MUCH have you given to me,
Yet I ask for more.
I come to you not merely for the
draught of water, but for the
spring ;
Not for guidance to the door alone,
but to the Master's hall ; not only
for the gift of love, but for the
lover himself.
There are some things which make our heart brim and overflow with emotion....it takes a Taare Zameen Par, an MS rendition of "kurai ondrum illai", an orange and pink filled morning sky with the sun at the horizon, the sound of a sanskrit shlok in a foreign land or a Tagore poem.... The above one I read about 7 years ago and it has stayed etched on gold in my memory.....from its sheer beauty of expression!
This poem actually got me reading about Tagore and his works and I was rewarded with a few more nuggets from his compositions....i dedicate this post to Tagore and the emotions that accompany every rendition of his....
A handsome portrait indeed! Well what is to be said of this great poet, writer, playwright, social reformer and educationist that has not been written about and said before?
He started writing poems from the age of 7! In fact, Tagore has never been stable for too long...a man of varied interests and ideas, he found that he could not root himself to a single spot for too long. Right from his schooling days, he found that he was not comfortable with the conventional education methods and preferred having governesses come home to teach him...
He then planned to complete his college education from England and set sail for this purpose westward but returned back to India before completing his college as he wanted to be with this family!
You hide yourself in your own glory,
my King.
The sand-grain and the dew-drop are
more proudly apparent than your-
self.
The world unabashed calls all things
its own that are yours yet it is
never brought to shame.
You make room for us while standing
aside in silence; therefore love
lights her own lamp to seek you
and comes to your worship un-
bidden.
&
WHEN from the house of feast I came
back home, the spell of the mid-
night quieted the dance in my
blood.
My heart became silent at once like
a deserted theatre with its lamps
out.
My mind crossed the dark and stood
among the stars, and I saw that
we were playing unafraid in the
silent courtyard of our King's
palace.
Wow! It would surely take a person who has truly realized and felt the unfathomable love of the creator above to be able to express himself as eloquently as this! He was of course drawn to disapprove any act of inhuman proportions which made him repudiate his knighthood in his historic letter to Lord Chelmsford in 1919 as a protest against the barbaric Jallianwallabagh massacre - an act which must have twisted the chords in the heart of a delicate and sensitive character which he expresses himself as through his poems...
NONE needs be thrust aside to make
room for you.
When love prepares your seat she
prepares it for all.
Where the earthly King appears,
guards keep out the crowd, but
when you come, my King, the
whole world comes in your wake.
His sense of a loving and fair world was what made him a part of the freedom fight as this was against his natural instincts of love and humanity!
MY songs are the same as are the spring
flowers, they come from you.
Yet I bring these to you as my own.
You smile and accept them, and you
are glad at my joy of pride.
If my song flowers are frail and they
fade and drop in the dust, I shall
never grieve.
For absence is not loss in your hand,
and the fugitive moments that
blossom in beauty are kept ever
fresh in your wreath.
How true! A realization that nothing can be regarded as our own in an ephemeral world must have prodded him to actually initiate funding and establish his attempt at a lasting educational institution through which he tried to immortalize a convergence of Indian and western philosophy! A true visionary he was indeed who realized that imitating cultures was a waste and that true development could be achieved only by a synergy of ideas from the orient and the Occident!
You allowed your kingly power to
vanish, Shajahan, but your wish was
to make imperishable a tear-drop of
love.
Time has no pity for the human
heart, he laughs at its sad struggle to
remember.
You allured him with beauty, made
him captive, and crowned the formless
death with fadeless form.
he secret whispered in the hush of
night to the ear of your love is wrought
in the perpetual silence of stone.
Though empires crumble to dust,
and centuries are lost in shadows, the
marble still sighs to the stars, " I
remember."
" I remember." But life forgets,
for she has her call to the Endless :
and she goes on her voyage un-
burdened, leaving her memories to
the forlorn forms of beauty.
What better tribute can the Tajmahal hope to have than these immortalized words of Tagore, as beautiful as the monument itself! While historians may satisfy their cynicism by pointing out that the Taj can hardly be considered to be an of the love of a man for one woman, and can more likely be accounted for as the work of an unrealistic monarch infatuated with his own grandeur, it truly takes a belief in the warmth and love that humanity has left in it, to credit the intentions behind the making of the Taj to pure love as attributed by Tagore in these verses!
HER neighbours call her dark in the
village but she is a lily to my heart,
yes, a lily though not fair. Light
came muffled with clouds when first
I saw her in the field ; her head was
bare, her veil was off, her braided hair
hanging loose on her neck. She may
be dark as they say in the village, but
I have seen her black eyes and am
glad.
The pulse of the air boded storm.
She rushed out of the hut when she
heard her dappled cow low in dismay.
For a moment she turned her large
eyes to the clouds, and felt a stir of the
coming rain in the sky. I stood at
the corner of the rice-field, if she
noticed me, it was known only to her
(and perhaps I know it). She is dark as
the message of the shower in summer,
dark as the shade of the flowering wood-
land ; she is dark as the longing for
unknown love in the wistful night of
May.
The romantic in tagore is rampant in these verses as he describes the inner beauty in woman that he so admired and worshipped! Makes me wonder what a delight he must have been as a partner to Mrinalini Devi, his consort through life!
THOU hast given me thy seat at thy
window from the early hour.
I have spoken to thy silent servants
of the road running on thy
errands, and have sung with thy
choir of the sky.
I have seen the sea in calm bearing
its immeasurable silence, and in
storm struggling to break open
its own mystery of depth.
I have watched the earth in its pro-
digal feast of youth, and in its
slow hours of brooding shadows.
Those who went to sow seeds have
heard my greetings, and those
who brought their harvest home
or their empty baskets have passed
by my songs.
Thus at last my day has ended and
now in the evening I sing my last
song to say that I have loved thy
world.
So sang the man who breathed his last after having loved and enjoyed his transient stay in this playground of the lord....he had played his best - a gentleman's game, and now lives on in the hearts of all those who worship his expression of thought, beauty and romance!
Yet I ask for more.
I come to you not merely for the
draught of water, but for the
spring ;
Not for guidance to the door alone,
but to the Master's hall ; not only
for the gift of love, but for the
lover himself.
There are some things which make our heart brim and overflow with emotion....it takes a Taare Zameen Par, an MS rendition of "kurai ondrum illai", an orange and pink filled morning sky with the sun at the horizon, the sound of a sanskrit shlok in a foreign land or a Tagore poem.... The above one I read about 7 years ago and it has stayed etched on gold in my memory.....from its sheer beauty of expression!
This poem actually got me reading about Tagore and his works and I was rewarded with a few more nuggets from his compositions....i dedicate this post to Tagore and the emotions that accompany every rendition of his....
A handsome portrait indeed! Well what is to be said of this great poet, writer, playwright, social reformer and educationist that has not been written about and said before?
He started writing poems from the age of 7! In fact, Tagore has never been stable for too long...a man of varied interests and ideas, he found that he could not root himself to a single spot for too long. Right from his schooling days, he found that he was not comfortable with the conventional education methods and preferred having governesses come home to teach him...
He then planned to complete his college education from England and set sail for this purpose westward but returned back to India before completing his college as he wanted to be with this family!
You hide yourself in your own glory,
my King.
The sand-grain and the dew-drop are
more proudly apparent than your-
self.
The world unabashed calls all things
its own that are yours yet it is
never brought to shame.
You make room for us while standing
aside in silence; therefore love
lights her own lamp to seek you
and comes to your worship un-
bidden.
&
WHEN from the house of feast I came
back home, the spell of the mid-
night quieted the dance in my
blood.
My heart became silent at once like
a deserted theatre with its lamps
out.
My mind crossed the dark and stood
among the stars, and I saw that
we were playing unafraid in the
silent courtyard of our King's
palace.
Wow! It would surely take a person who has truly realized and felt the unfathomable love of the creator above to be able to express himself as eloquently as this! He was of course drawn to disapprove any act of inhuman proportions which made him repudiate his knighthood in his historic letter to Lord Chelmsford in 1919 as a protest against the barbaric Jallianwallabagh massacre - an act which must have twisted the chords in the heart of a delicate and sensitive character which he expresses himself as through his poems...
NONE needs be thrust aside to make
room for you.
When love prepares your seat she
prepares it for all.
Where the earthly King appears,
guards keep out the crowd, but
when you come, my King, the
whole world comes in your wake.
His sense of a loving and fair world was what made him a part of the freedom fight as this was against his natural instincts of love and humanity!
MY songs are the same as are the spring
flowers, they come from you.
Yet I bring these to you as my own.
You smile and accept them, and you
are glad at my joy of pride.
If my song flowers are frail and they
fade and drop in the dust, I shall
never grieve.
For absence is not loss in your hand,
and the fugitive moments that
blossom in beauty are kept ever
fresh in your wreath.
How true! A realization that nothing can be regarded as our own in an ephemeral world must have prodded him to actually initiate funding and establish his attempt at a lasting educational institution through which he tried to immortalize a convergence of Indian and western philosophy! A true visionary he was indeed who realized that imitating cultures was a waste and that true development could be achieved only by a synergy of ideas from the orient and the Occident!
You allowed your kingly power to
vanish, Shajahan, but your wish was
to make imperishable a tear-drop of
love.
Time has no pity for the human
heart, he laughs at its sad struggle to
remember.
You allured him with beauty, made
him captive, and crowned the formless
death with fadeless form.
he secret whispered in the hush of
night to the ear of your love is wrought
in the perpetual silence of stone.
Though empires crumble to dust,
and centuries are lost in shadows, the
marble still sighs to the stars, " I
remember."
" I remember." But life forgets,
for she has her call to the Endless :
and she goes on her voyage un-
burdened, leaving her memories to
the forlorn forms of beauty.
What better tribute can the Tajmahal hope to have than these immortalized words of Tagore, as beautiful as the monument itself! While historians may satisfy their cynicism by pointing out that the Taj can hardly be considered to be an of the love of a man for one woman, and can more likely be accounted for as the work of an unrealistic monarch infatuated with his own grandeur, it truly takes a belief in the warmth and love that humanity has left in it, to credit the intentions behind the making of the Taj to pure love as attributed by Tagore in these verses!
HER neighbours call her dark in the
village but she is a lily to my heart,
yes, a lily though not fair. Light
came muffled with clouds when first
I saw her in the field ; her head was
bare, her veil was off, her braided hair
hanging loose on her neck. She may
be dark as they say in the village, but
I have seen her black eyes and am
glad.
The pulse of the air boded storm.
She rushed out of the hut when she
heard her dappled cow low in dismay.
For a moment she turned her large
eyes to the clouds, and felt a stir of the
coming rain in the sky. I stood at
the corner of the rice-field, if she
noticed me, it was known only to her
(and perhaps I know it). She is dark as
the message of the shower in summer,
dark as the shade of the flowering wood-
land ; she is dark as the longing for
unknown love in the wistful night of
May.
The romantic in tagore is rampant in these verses as he describes the inner beauty in woman that he so admired and worshipped! Makes me wonder what a delight he must have been as a partner to Mrinalini Devi, his consort through life!
THOU hast given me thy seat at thy
window from the early hour.
I have spoken to thy silent servants
of the road running on thy
errands, and have sung with thy
choir of the sky.
I have seen the sea in calm bearing
its immeasurable silence, and in
storm struggling to break open
its own mystery of depth.
I have watched the earth in its pro-
digal feast of youth, and in its
slow hours of brooding shadows.
Those who went to sow seeds have
heard my greetings, and those
who brought their harvest home
or their empty baskets have passed
by my songs.
Thus at last my day has ended and
now in the evening I sing my last
song to say that I have loved thy
world.
So sang the man who breathed his last after having loved and enjoyed his transient stay in this playground of the lord....he had played his best - a gentleman's game, and now lives on in the hearts of all those who worship his expression of thought, beauty and romance!
