The Gardener

By Rabindranath Tagore

She dwelt on the hillside by the edge of a maize-field, near the spring that flows in laughing rills through the solemn shadows of ancient trees. The women came there to fill their jars, and travellers would sit there to rest and talk. She worked and dreamed daily to the tune of the bubbling stream.

One evening the stranger came down from the cloud-hidden peak; his locks were tangled like drowsy snakes. We asked in wonder, "Who are you?" He answered not but sat by the garrulous stream and silently gazed at the hut where she dwelt. Our hearts quaked in fear and we came back home when it was night.

Next morning when the women came to fetch water at the spring by the deodar trees, they found the doors open in her hut, but her voice was gone and where was her smiling face? The empty jar lay on the floor and her lamp had burnt itself out in the corner. No one knew where she had fled to before it was morningâ and the stranger had gone.

• Language: English
• Publisher: eBookIt.com
• Release date: Apr 26, 2016
• ISBN: 9781456618711

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

[aliceanna-1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Lovely lyrical poetry in the Hindu tradition.

[enockpioulle · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

My beloved poet and one of his masterpieces. Some of the most beautiful verses ever written about love.

[edwinbcn · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

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.