The Essential Works of Tagore. Rabindranath Tagore
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a passing boat.
I have wondered in my mind how simply it stands before me, this great world: with what fond and familiar ease it fills my heart, this encounter with the Eternal Stranger.
3
The ferry-boat plies between the two villages facing each other across the narrow stream.
The water is neither wide nor deep—a mere break in the path that enhances the small adventures of daily life, like a break in the words of a song across which the tune gleefully streams.
While the towers of wealth rise high and crash to ruin, these villages talk to each other across the garrulous stream, and the ferry-boat plies between them, age after age, from seed-time to harvest.
4
In the evening after they have brought their cattle home, they sit on the grass before their huts to know that you are among them unseen, to repeat in their songs the name which they have fondly given you.
While kings' crowns shine and disappear like falling stars, around village huts your name rises through the still night from the simple hearts of your lovers whose names are unrecorded.
5
In Baby's world, the trees shake their leaves at him, murmuring verses in an ancient tongue that dates from before the age of meaning, and the moon feigns to be of his own age—the solitary baby of night.
In the world of the old, flowers dutifully blush at the make-believe of faery legends, and broken dolls confess that they are made of clay.
6
My world, when I was a child, you were a little girl-neighbour, a loving timid stranger.
Then you grew bold and talked to me across the fence, offering me toys and flowers and shells.
Next you coaxed me away from my work, you tempted me into the land of the dusk or the weedy corner of some garden in mid-day loneliness.
At length you told me stories about bygone times, with which the present ever longs to meet so as to be rescued from its prison in the moment.
7
How often, great Earth, have I felt my being yearn to flow over you, sharing in the happiness of each green blade that raises its signal banner in answer to the beckoning blue of the sky!
I feel as if I had belonged to you ages before I was born. That is why, in the days when the autumn light shimmers on the mellowing ears of rice, I seem to remember a past when my mind was everywhere, and even to hear voices as of playfellows echoing from the remote and deeply veiled past.
When, in the evening, the cattle return to their folds, raising dust from the meadow paths, as the moon rises higher than the smoke ascending from the village huts, I feel sad as for some great separation that happened in the first morning of existence.
8
My mind still buzzed with the cares of a busy day; I sat on without noting how twilight was deepening into dark. Suddenly light stirred across the gloom and touched me as with a finger.
I lifted my head and met the gaze of the full moon widened in wonder like a child's. It held my eyes for long, and I felt as though a love-letter had been secretly dropped in at my window. And ever since my heart is breaking to write for answer something fragrant as Night's unseen flowers—great as her declaration spelt out in nameless stars.
9
The clouds thicken till the morning light seems like a bedraggled fringe to the rainy night.
A little girl stands at her window, still as a rainbow at the gate of a broken-down storm.
She is my neighbour, and has come upon the earth like some god's rebellious laughter. Her mother in anger calls her incorrigible; her father smiles and calls her mad.
She is like a runaway waterfall leaping over boulders, like the topmost bamboo twig rustling in the restless wind.
She stands at her window looking out into the sky.
Her sister comes to say, "Mother calls you." She shakes her head.
Her little brother with his toy boat comes and tries to pull her off to play; she snatches her hand from his. The boy persists and she gives him a slap on the back.
The first great voice was the voice of wind and water in the beginning of earth's creation.
That ancient cry of nature—her dumb call to unborn life—has reached this child's heart and leads it out alone beyond the fence of our times: so there she stands, possessed by eternity!
10
The kingfisher sits still on the prow of an empty boat, while in the shallow margin of the stream a buffalo lies tranquilly blissful, its eyes half closed to savour the luxury of cool mud.
Undismayed by the barking of the village cur, the cow browses on the bank, followed by a hopping group of saliks hunting moths.
I sit in the tamarind grove, where the cries of dumb life congregate—the cattle's lowing, the sparrows' chatter, the shrill scream of a kite overhead, the crickets' chirp, and the splash of a fish in the water.
I peep into the primeval nursery of life, where the mother Earth thrills at the first living clutch near her breast.
11
At the sleepy village the noon was still like a sunny midnight when my holidays came to their end.
My little girl of four had followed me all the morning from room to room, watching my preparations in grave silence, till, wearied, she sat by the doorpost strangely quiet, murmuring to herself, "Father must not go!"
This was the meal hour, when sleep daily overcame her, but her mother had forgotten her and the child was too unhappy to complain.
At last, when I stretched out my arms to her to say farewell, she never moved, but sadly looking at me said, "Father, you must not go!"
And it amused me to tears to think how this little child dared to fight the giant world of necessity with no other resource than those few words, "Father, you must not go!"
12
Take your holiday, my boy; there are the blue sky and the bare field, the barn and the ruined temple under the ancient tamarind.
My holiday must be taken through yours, finding light in the dance of your eyes, music in your noisy shouts.
To you autumn brings the true holiday freedom: to me it brings the impossibility of work; for lo! you burst into my room.
Yes, my holiday is an endless freedom for love to disturb me.
13
In the evening my little daughter heard a call from her companions below the window.
She timidly went down the dark stairs holding a lamp in her hand, shielding it behind her veil.
I was sitting on my terrace in the star-lit night of March, when at a sudden cry I ran to see.
Her lamp had gone out in the dark spiral staircase. I asked, "Child, why did you cry?"
From below she answered in distress, "Father, I have lost myself!"
When I came back to the terrace under the star-lit night of March, I looked at the sky, and it seemed that a child was walking there treasuring many lamps behind her veils.
If their light went out, she would suddenly stop and a cry would sound from sky to sky, "Father, I have lost myself!"
14
The evening stood bewildered among street lamps, its gold tarnished by the city dust.
A woman, gaudily decked and painted, leant over the rail of her balcony, a living fire waiting for its moths.
Suddenly an eddy was formed in the road round a street-boy