The Crescent Moon: Poems and Stories

By Rabindranath Tagore and Ruskin Bond

Heartfelt poems and engaging stories for and about children by one of the greatest writers of Indian literature.

In The Crescent Moon, Rabindranath Tagore brings alive the world of a child—in some poems he describes the simple joys of children at play, while in others, he feels the bonds of affection be

• Language: English
• Publisher: Speaking Tiger Books
• Release date: Dec 10, 2017
• ISBN: 9789387164161

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.

Book preview

introduction

The name Rabindranath Tagore usually conjures up an image of someone very serious. He is the revered poet and Nobel laureate. But those who have read him know that he also had a playful and humorous side. It was a tender, emotional side filled with laughter and wit. This came through best in some of his poetry for children. In his lifetime, Tagore wrote hundreds of poems and songs, many of which he set to music himself. He also wrote dance dramas and plays, apart from short stories, novels and essays. In this large body of work there are some poems and stories that he wrote for and about children, which have been brought together in this volume.

Each poem in The Crescent Moon evokes the tender love of a mother and her child. Sometimes the mother is the beautiful land all around, and sometimes she is very much a human mother, calling out to the crescent moon in the sky as she holds her child in her arms in the darkening night. Some poems are about the sweet sleep that plays on a baby’s eyes at night, and in another the mother wonders who stole sleep from her baby’s eyes. Was it the Sleep-stealer who lurks about near the pond in the evenings?

Tagore also wrote a number of stories with strong child characters. One of my favourites is Minnie, from the story ‘The Kabuliwalla’. Minnie is a smart, precocious child, and her unlikely friendship with the burly Afghan from Kabul is beautifully described. Perhaps since he surrounded himself with children of all ages, Tagore was able to get to the mind of a child and put down in his stories exactly how a child thinks, talks and reacts to the world.

The Tagore family was a large one and there were always children playing about, studying—or trying not to study! Tagore himself has written elsewhere of his disdain for all kinds of formal schooling. He quite hated the schools he was sent to; the rote learning that the children had to do, and the exams they had to write. For him, studying meant letting the mind roam free to imagine in order to truly understand what is being taught. He believed so strongly in this that he started his own school in Shantiniketan. His wife, Mrinalini, gave him much of her jewellery to sell in order to raise money for the school. At Shantiniketan he created the kind of school that perhaps even I would have been happy to go to! Here, classes were held out in the open, under trees, no one was punished, and there was no learning by memory. Children worked and studied according to their interests. They played games, did art and learnt all that is essential, without feeling school to be a burden. All these thoughts are shown very effectively in the story ‘The Parrot’s Learning’. What happens if you keep pumping words and concepts into students? Read the story and see!

It is interesting that Tagore’s writing for children was not just poetry and stories, but also books that were meant to be used as textbooks! He wrote a series of Bengali language textbooks called Sahaj Path (Easy Reading), that started with simple rhymes teaching the alphabets and went on to teach sentences, paragraphs and rhymes. The books were illustrated by the famous artist Nandalal Bose, and are still used to teach children Bengali. Here is a little sample:

My introduction to Tagore, however, was not as a child reading such textbooks, or by hearing his songs. It was through a volume of poetry I discovered in a forest rest house during one of my stepfather’s shikar expeditions. I was always averse to guns and shooting and preferred to see the animals and admire them for their beauty. Of course, no one else understood this, and I would stay back in the rest house when my parents and their friends went out shooting. Most of these bungalows had libraries, or at least shelves of books, that no one bothered to dust, let alone remove books from to read. It was from one such dusty shelf that I rescued a volume of poetry written by Tagore, translated into English, and read it over a quiet afternoon, sitting happily all by myself in the empty house. I later read many of his works, whatever I could find in various translations, but my happiest memory of reading remains that day in the middle of the forest, with the calls of birds outside and the distant roar of the jeep carrying away all the grown-ups so I could read in peace.

I hope this book makes many such happy memories for you too, as you read the beautiful poems and stories in it.

Ruskin Bond

Landour, Mussoorie

poems

the home

I paced alone on the road across the field while the sunset was hiding its last gold like a miser.

The daylight sank deeper and deeper into the darkness, and the widowed land, whose harvest had been reaped, lay silent.

Suddenly a boy’s shrill voice rose into the sky. He traversed the dark unseen, leaving the track of his song across the hush of the evening.

His village home lay there at the end of the waste land, beyond the sugarcane field, hidden among the shadows of the banana and the slender areca palm, the cocoa-nut and the dark green jackfruit trees.

I stopped for a moment in my lonely way under the starlight, and saw spread before me the darkened earth surrounding with her arms countless homes furnished with cradles and beds, mothers’ hearts and evening lamps, and young lives glad with a gladness that knows nothing of its value for the world.

on the seashore

On the seashore of endless worlds children meet.

The infinite sky is motionless overhead and the restless water is boisterous. On the seashore of endless worlds the children meet with shouts and dances.

They build their houses with sand, and they play with empty shells. With withered leaves they weave their boats and smilingly float them on the vast deep. Children have their play on the seashore of worlds.

They know not how to swim, they know not how to cast nets. Pearl-fishers dive for pearls, merchants sail in their ships, while children gather pebbles and scatter them again. They seek not for hidden treasures, they know not how to cast nets.

The sea surges up with laughter, and pale gleams the smile of the sea-beach. Death-dealing waves sing meaningless ballads to the children, even like a mother while rocking her baby’s cradle. The sea plays with children, and pale gleams the smile of the sea-beach.

On the seashore of endless worlds children meet. Tempest roams in the pathless sky, ships are wrecked in the trackless water, death is abroad and children play. On the seashore of endless worlds is the great meeting of children.

the source

The sleep that flits on baby’s eyes—does anybody know from where it comes? Yes, there is a rumour that it has its dwelling where, in the fairy village among shadows of the forest dimly lit with glowworms, there hang two shy buds of enchantment. From there it comes to kiss baby’s eyes.

The smile that flickers on baby’s lips when he sleeps—does anybody know where it was born? Yes, there is a rumour that a young pale beam of a crescent moon touched the edge of a vanishing autumn cloud, and there the smile was first born in the dream of a dew-washed morning—the smile that flickers on baby’s lips when he sleeps.

The sweet, soft freshness that blooms on baby’s limbs—does anybody know where it was hidden so long? Yes, when the mother was a young girl it lay pervading her heart in tender and silent mystery of love—the sweet, soft freshness that has bloomed on baby’s limbs.

baby’s way

If baby only wanted to, he could fly up to heaven this moment.

It is not for nothing that he does not leave us.

He loves to rest his head on mother’s bosom, and cannot ever bear to lose sight of her.

Baby knows all manner of wise words, though few on earth