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    Fruit-Gathering
    Fruit-Gathering
    Fruit-Gathering
    Ebook124 pages48 minutes

    Fruit-Gathering

    By Rabindranath Tagore

    ()

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    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherArchive Classics
    Release dateJan 1, 1985
    Fruit-Gathering
    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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      Book preview

      Fruit-Gathering - Rabindranath Tagore

      The Project Gutenberg EBook of Fruit-Gathering, 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.net

      Title: Fruit-Gathering

      Author: Rabindranath Tagore

      Posting Date: March 6, 2009 [EBook #6522] Release Date: September, 2004 First Posted: December 25, 2002

      Language: English

      *** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK FRUIT-GATHERING ***

      Produced by Chetan K. Jain and Eric Eldred

      Original html version created at eldritchpress.org by Eric Eldred. This eBook was produced by Chetan K. Jain.

      Fruit-Gathering

      By Rabindranath Tagore

      [Translated from Bengali to English by the author]

      New York: The Macmillan Company, 1916

      I

      Bid me and I shall gather my fruits to bring them in full baskets into your courtyard, though some are lost and some not ripe.

      For the season grows heavy with its fulness, and there is a plaintive shepherd's pipe in the shade.

      Bid me and I shall set sail on the river.

      The March wind is fretful, fretting the languid waves into murmurs.

      The garden has yielded its all, and in the weary hour of evening the call comes from your house on the shore in the sunset.

      II

      My life when young was like a flower—a flower that loosens a petal or two from her abundance and never feels the loss when the spring breeze comes to beg at her door.

      Now at the end of youth my life is like a fruit, having nothing to spare, and waiting to offer herself completely with her full burden of sweetness.

      III

      Is summer's festival only for fresh blossoms and not also for withered leaves and faded flowers?

      Is the song of the sea in tune only with the rising waves?

      Does it not also sing with the waves that fall?

      Jewels are woven into the carpet where stands my king, but there are patient clods waiting to be touched by his feet.

      Few are the wise and the great who sit by my Master, but he has taken the foolish in his arms and made me his servant for ever.

      IV

      I woke and found his letter with the morning.

      I do not know what it says, for I cannot read.

      I shall leave the wise man alone with his books, I shall not trouble him, for who knows if he can read what the letter says.

      Let me hold it to my forehead and press it to my heart.

      When the night grows still and stars come out one by one I will spread it on my lap and stay silent.

      The rustling leaves will read it aloud to me, the rushing stream will chant it, and the seven wise stars will sing it to me from the sky.

      I cannot find what I seek, I cannot understand what I would learn; but this unread letter has lightened my burdens and turned my thoughts into songs.

      V

      A handful of dust could hide your signal when I did not know its meaning.

      Now that I am wiser I read it in all that hid it before.

      It is painted in petals of flowers; waves flash it from their foam; hills hold it high on their summits.

      I had my face turned from you, therefore I read the letters awry and knew not their meaning.

      VI

      Where roads are made I lose my way.

      In the wide water, in the blue sky there is no line of a track.

      The pathway is hidden by the birds' wings, by the star-fires, by the flowers of the wayfaring seasons.

      And I ask my heart if its blood carries the wisdom of the unseen way.

      VII

      Alas, I cannot stay in the house, and home has become no home to me, for the eternal Stranger calls, he is going along the road.

      The sound of his footfall knocks at my breast; it pains me!

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