Stray Birds
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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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Stray Birds - Rabindranath Tagore
STRAY BIRDS
BY
RABINDRANATH TAGORE
[TRANSLATED FROM BENGALI TO ENGLISH BY THE AUTHOR]
1916
STRAY BIRDS
1
Stray birds of summer come to my window to sing and fly away. And yellow leaves of autumn, which have no songs, flutter and fall there with a sigh.
2
O troupe of little vagrants of the world, leave your footprints in my words.
3
The world puts off its mask of vastness to its lover. It becomes small as one song, as one kiss of the eternal.
4
It is the tears of the earth that keep her smiles in bloom.
5
The mighty desert is burning for the love of a blade of grass who shakes her head and laughs and flies away.
6
If you shed tears when you miss the sun, you also miss the stars.
7
The sands in your way beg for your song and your movement, dancing water. Will you carry the burden of their lameness?
8
Her wistful face haunts my dreams like the rain at night.
9
Once we dreamt that we were strangers. We wake up to find that we were dear to each other.
10
Sorrow is hushed into peace in my heart like the evening among the silent trees.
11
Some unseen fingers, like idle breeze, are playing upon my heart the music of the ripples.
12
What language is thine, O sea?
The language of eternal question.
"What language is thy answer, O sky?
The language of eternal silence.
13
Listen, my heart, to the whispers of the world with which it makes love to you.
14
The mystery of creation is like the darkness of night--it is great. Delusions