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    The Gardener
    The Gardener
    The Gardener
    Ebook93 pages1 hour

    The Gardener

    By Rabindranath Tagore

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    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherArchive Classics
    Release dateJan 1, 1988
    The Gardener
    Author

    Rabindranath Tagore

    Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941) was an Indian poet, composer, philosopher, and painter from Bengal. Born to a prominent Brahmo Samaj family, Tagore was raised mostly by servants following his mother’s untimely death. His father, a leading philosopher and reformer, hosted countless artists and intellectuals at the family mansion in Calcutta, introducing his children to poets, philosophers, and musicians from a young age. Tagore avoided conventional education, instead reading voraciously and studying astronomy, science, Sanskrit, and classical Indian poetry. As a teenager, he began publishing poems and short stories in Bengali and Maithili. Following his father’s wish for him to become a barrister, Tagore read law for a brief period at University College London, where he soon turned to studying the works of Shakespeare and Thomas Browne. In 1883, Tagore returned to India to marry and manage his ancestral estates. During this time, Tagore published his Manasi (1890) poems and met the folk poet Gagan Harkara, with whom he would work to compose popular songs. In 1901, having written countless poems, plays, and short stories, Tagore founded an ashram, but his work as a spiritual leader was tragically disrupted by the deaths of his wife and two of their children, followed by his father’s death in 1905. In 1913, Tagore was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, making him the first lyricist and non-European to be awarded the distinction. Over the next several decades, Tagore wrote his influential novel The Home and the World (1916), toured dozens of countries, and advocated on behalf of Dalits and other oppressed peoples.

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    Reviews for The Gardener

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    • 3/5
      Lovely lyrical poetry in the Hindu tradition.
    • 5/5
      My beloved poet and one of his masterpieces. Some of the most beautiful verses ever written about love.
    • 4/5
      The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) designated 2011 as the Year of Tagore, celebrating the 150th anniversary of his birth. Rabindranath Tagore was the first non-European author to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, in 1913. Authors from the Eastern world are heavily underrepresented, and it wasn't until the late 1980s that the Prize was awarded to writers in Arabic, Japanese and, later on, Chinese-speaking traditions.In the first forty years of his career, Rabindranath Tagore wrote in his native Bengali, fearing that his English was not good enough. After 1911, he started translating some of his own poetry into English, but the vast majority of his poems remains untranslated.Tagore is mostly known for his poetry, although he also wrote novels, short stories, plays, and essays, and composed more than 300 pieces of music and more than 2,500 songs. He also wrote for the theatre, both dramas, musical plays, and ballets. Nonetheless, Tagore is still relatively unknown in the West, perhaps heard of, but little read. At a higher age, Tagore also expressed himself in drawing and painting.The gardener is a cycle of 85 love poems. Tagore's poetry in Bengali was mostly written in rhyme. In his later years, he also experimented with prose poems. His English translations, such as the poems in The gardener have alliteration, but no end rhyme.His poetry is lyrical, tinged with an all pervading optimism, drawing of observations of simple life and nature. Extensive use of simile, metaphor and allegory create an atmosphere of mysticism, and Tagore's spirituality may, at first, estrange the Western reader. His many references to God in the English poems should be understood as reference to an over-arching God Being, never entirely pan-theistic, and never specifically referring to any known Gods or deities.

    Book preview

    The Gardener - Rabindranath Tagore

    The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Gardener, by Rabindranath Tagore

    This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org

    Title: The Gardener

    Author: Rabindranath Tagore

    Release Date: October, 2004 [EBook #6686] Posting Date: June 5, 2009

    Language: English

    *** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE GARDENER ***

    Produced by Chetan Jain

    THE GARDENER

    By Rabindranath Tagore

    Translated by the author from the original Bengali

    1915

    [Frontispiece: Rabindranath Tagore. Age 16—see tagore.jpg]

    To W. B. Yeats

    Thanks are due to the editor of Poetry, a Magazine of Verse, for permission to reprint eight poems in this volume.

    Preface

    Most of the lyrics of love and life, the translations of which from Bengali are published in this book, were written much earlier than the series of religious poems contained in the book named Gitanjali. The translations are not always literal—the originals being sometimes abridged and sometimes paraphrased.

    Rabindranath Tagore.

    1

    SERVANT. Have mercy upon your servant, my queen!

     QUEEN. The assembly is over and my servants are all gone. Why

       do you come at this late hour?

     SERVANT. When you have finished with others, that is my time.

     I come to ask what remains for your last servant to do.

    QUEEN. What can you expect when it is too late?

    SERVANT. Make me the gardener of your flower garden.

    QUEEN. What folly is this?

     SERVANT. I will give up my other work.

     I will throw my swords and lances down in the dust. Do not send

       me to distant courts; do not bid me undertake new conquests.

       But make me the gardener of your flower garden.

    QUEEN. What will your duties be?

     SERVANT. The service of your idle days.

     I will keep fresh the grassy path where you walk in the morning,

       where your feet will be greeted with praise at every step by

       the flowers eager for death.

     I will swing you in a swing among the branches of the

    saptaparna, where the early evening moon will struggle

       to kiss your skirt through the leaves.

     I will replenish with scented oil the lamp that burns by your

       bedside, and decorate your footstool with sandal and saffron

       paste in wondrous designs.

    QUEEN. What will you have for your reward?

    SERVANT. To be allowed to hold your little fists like tender lotus-buds and slip flower chains over your wrists; to tinge the soles of your feet with the red juice of ashoka petals and kiss away the speck of dust that may chance to linger there.

    QUEEN. Your prayers are granted, my servant, you will be the gardener of my flower garden.

    2

     "Ah, poet, the evening draws near; your hair is turning grey.

     Do you in your lonely musing hear the message of the hereafter?

     It is evening, the poet said, "and I am listening because some

       one may call from the village, late though it be.

     "I watch if young straying hearts meet together, and two pairs of

       eager eyes beg for music to break their silence and speak for

       them.

     "Who is there to weave their passionate songs, if I sit on the

       shore of life and contemplate death and the beyond?

     "The early evening star disappears.

     "The glow of a funeral pyre slowly dies by the silent river.

     "Jackals cry in chorus from the courtyard of the deserted house

       in the light of the worn-out moon.

     "If some wanderer, leaving home, come here to watch the night and

       with bowed head listen to the murmur of the darkness, who is

       there to whisper the secrets of life into his ears if I,

       shutting my doors, should try to free myself from mortal bonds?

     "It is a trifle that my hair is turning grey.

     "I am ever as young or as old as the youngest and the oldest of

       this village.

     "Some have smiles, sweet and simple, and some a sly twinkle in

       their eyes.

     "Some have tears that well up in the daylight, and others tears

       that are hidden in the gloom.

     They all have need for me, and I have no time to brood over the

       afterlife.

     I am of an age with each, what matter if my hair turns grey?

    3

     In the morning I cast my net into the sea.

     I dragged up from the dark abyss things of strange aspect and

       strange beauty—some shone like a smile, some glistened like

       tears, and some were flushed like the cheeks of a bride.

     When with the day's burden I went home, my love was sitting in

       the garden idly tearing the leaves of a flower.

     I hesitated for a moment, and then placed at her feet all that I

       had dragged up, and stood silent.

     She glanced at them and said, "What strange things are these? I

       know not of what use they are!"

     I bowed my head in shame and thought, "I have not fought for

       these, I did not

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