TAGORE AS POET OF CHILDHOOD
By
PROF. T. VIRABHADRUDU, M.A.
Another
great contribution that Tagore made to literature is his poetry of childhood.
It may look strange to many that the little child can be a source of poetic
pleasure, but there it is that many great philosophers drew their inspiration
from the life of the tiny little child. In English poetry before the advent of
Romanticism, i.e., before the time of Blake and Wordsworth, there was hardly a
poem of childhood worth the name. Allusions to little children may be found
here and there, but the desire to make the child the main object of poetic
study, to interpret the child’s life and relate it to the past and future of
man’s career is of comparatively recent growth in English literature. The Romantic
Age brought about a widening of the poet’s heart, and a changed outlook on man
and creatures below man, and Wordsworth’s Intimations of Immortality in
which we have a mystical interpretation of childhood is worth remembering in
this connection. The child is the subject of Rabindranath’s Crescent Moon. That
sweet little book which is a collection of forty lyrics is one of the very best
things that the poet has given to the world. In it we find a most beautiful
description of the child-angel, his “silly” talk, his “absurd” questions,1
his attachment to his mother and her joy at the sight of the baby who is the
image of her hope and its fulfillment. It is a most sympathetic and imaginative
rendering of the child’s ways, the place he occupies in the mother’s life and
the message he conveys to humanity. It may be noted here that though the book
in its English shape was first printed in 1913, most of the poems had appeared
in their original Bengali for ten years earlier under the title of Sisu (The
Child) and had been intended to entertain the poet’s youngest son in the months
following his mother’s death. When the English translations are so delicious,
how sweet the songs must be as composed by the poet in his mother-tongue, only
those who are born to that language can say.
To
Poet Rabindranath the child is a most lovely object. To be surrounded by
children and to sing a song or relate a story to amuse them was a special
delight to him when he was at Santiniketan, and he was fond of
holding occasionally what he called “Our Children’s Durbar.” We know the child
is naughty and there is a long list of his “misdeeds”. But the poet indignantly
asks:
You
tore your clothes while playing–is that why they call you untidy?
O,
fie! What would they call an autumn morning that smiles through its ragged
clouds?
The
world in which the child wishes to live is that of Nature and the nourishment
he lives upon is imagination. Trees and flowers, the moon and the stars or the
rainbow in the sky give the child immense pleasure and here is an instance:
Ah, these jasmines, these white jasmines!
I
seem to remember the first day when I filled my hands with these jasmines,
these white jasmines.
I
have loved the sunlight, the sky and the green earth;
I
have heard the liquid murmur of the river through the darkness of midnight;
Yet
my memory is still sweet with the first white jasmines that I held in my hand
when I was a child.
Also, the little child
makes no distinction between the lights in the streets and the stars in the
sky. The baby’s world is a Peculiar region,
Where
messengers run errands for no cause between the kingdoms of kings of no
history;
Where
Reason makes kites of her laws and flies them and Truth sets
Fact free from its fetters.
When
the little fellow looks at the heavens, he thinks the folk in the clouds call
out to him to join them. Death-dealing waves, which are a terror to us, seem to
sing meaningless ballads to the children and sometimes, as in the case of
Raicharan’s. “Little Master”, “the mischievous fairies of the river with their
mysterious voices invite them to enter their playhouse.”
2 It is this imaginative instinct which induces
in the child a curious spirit of adventure. So the child in The Crescent
Moon tells his mother how he can easily “cross the seven seas and the
thirteen rivers of fairyland” and how he can without much difficulty discover
the princess who lies sleeping on the far-away shore of the seven impassable
seas. But all this is to make his beloved mother happy, for when he returns
from his travels he will bring her baskets of flowers and heaps of gold!
The
child, in Tagore’s opinion, is the image of innocence. He loves to look at the
moon and beckon to it to come and play with him. He asks his Dada (elder
brother), “When in the evening the round full moon gets entangled among the
branches of the Kadam tree, couldn’t somebody catch it?”
When it is shown how stupid is the thought of getting at the moon who is ever
so far from us, the little one replies:
‘Dada,
how foolish you are! When mother looks out of her window and smiles down at us
playing, would you call her far away?’
Innocence
and freshness of mind are characteristic of childhood, and emphasising the
significance of joy in the life of man, Rabindranath points out how man needs
these two qualities to appreciate the spiritual significance of many of our
festivals. 3 Coupled with this innocence is a sense of wonder “which
gives a child his right of entry into the treasure-house of mystery which is in
the heart of existence.” 4 Natural phenomena and the world of the
mysterious leave the common man unmoved. He either takes them for granted or
tries to explain them away. His attitude is one of indifference or contempt or
superstitious veneration based, of course, on fear. In the child, as in the
poet, they awaken a feeling of awe and curiosity to know their secrets. This
spirit which is generally associated with the medieval period in European
culture is revived in
My
mind travels back to my boyhood….I have looked at the universe with
“Wonder”–that “Wonder” has not vanished even today. If we look at this “Wonder”
from the point of view of our daily needs, we shall not find any meaning in it,
but we shall be able to solve its mystery if we enter its deeps. What is the
source of the wonder of a moonlit night, of the joy of a lover’s meeting?
Thus the child and the
poet are alike. They are dreamers and are both “of imagination all compact.”
Along
with these qualities, the child possesses, surprisingly enough, an
extraordinary sense of humour. Children often imitate the elders which is for
their own amusement or for the pleasure of playing the fool with them.
Sometimes they are not conscious of the humour, but their simple questions and
answers supply any amount of fun. The little boy in The Crescent Moon who
has been at his book a whole morning feels tired and wants to go out to play.
When the mother tells him that it is not yet afternoon and that it is just
twelve, the little rogue, who has been longing to be free, quietly asks:
If
twelve o’clock can come in the night, why can’t the night come when it is
twelve o’clock?
Seeing
his mother in a serious mood and feeling that it is due to her not having any
letter from the husband, the son consoles her by offering to write not one but
all father’s letters, provided he has pens and sheets of paper. Assuring her of
his knowledge of the alphabet from A right up to K, and of the beautiful big
hand in which the letter will be written, the young letter-writer adds:
When
I finish my writing, do you think I shall be so foolish as father to drop it
into the horrid postman’s bag?
I
shall bring it to you myself without waiting, and letter by letter help you to
read my writing.
One
day he asks he mother why his father–he is an author–is always writing and
writing, and why he cannot understand those books. He is astonished that when
he takes up his father’s pen or pencil and writes upon his book just as the
father does,–a, b, c, d, e, f, g, h, i,–or takes only one sheet to make a boat
with, she gets very angry while she does not open her lips when his father
spoils sheet after sheet of paper scribbling all sorts of things on both sides.
And he was reading to her the whole evening! Could she make out what he meant?
Once when Rabindranath, on the invitation of the Andhra University, delivered
at Waltair a course of four lectures, there was a young boy of twelve or
thirteen who made it a point to attend every lecture and was also very punctual
on each day. The lectures were in English and were also highly philosophical. A
middle-aged gentleman, a College Professor, noticing the boy’s regularity and
enthusiasm, asked quite casually, “Well, my young friend, you seem
to be a great admirer of Rabindranath Tagore. How much of these lectures have
you understood?” The boy, who was simplicity incarnate,
replied, in all humility and the deference which a boy of his age should show
his elders, “As much as all of you did.” Needless to say that the Professor did
not pursue the matter further!
One
aspect of childhood on which the poet has lavished his imagination is the
relation between the child and his mother, and the nature of the attachment
they have to each other is something very peculiar. One day the baby tells the
mother that he is going and, lest she should miss him, assures the good lady
that in the night he will, from his place in the starry sky, steal unobserved
into her room and lie upon her bosom while she sleeps and if any one were to
ask, “Where is our baby?” her reply would be, “He is in the pupils of my eyes,
he is in my body and in my soul.” The child with his charming face and sweet
smile is, as all of us know, an object of delight but wherefrom does the charm
come?
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.
The child is the
solace of the mother, the image of her heart’s yearnings, and the spiritual tie
between the two can be gathered from the following. The baby puts a somewhat
curious question to the mother, “Where have I come from, where did you pick me
up?” and the latter, half crying, half laughing, and clasping the baby to her
breast, replies that he had been all the while lying hidden in her heart as its
desire:
When
in girlhood my heart was opening its petals, you hovered as a fragrance about
it.
Heaven’s
first darling, twin-born with the morning light, you have floated down the
stream of the world’s life, and at last you have stranded on my heart.
As
I gaze on your face, mystery overwhelms me; you who belong to all have become
mine.
For
fear of losing you I hold you tight to my breast. What magic has snared the
world’s treasure in these slender arms of mine?
To
the mother, the child is God who has, to confer bliss on her, come into the
house in the shape of a sweet little creature. Below are given the sentiments
of a mother whose son, her only child, died three years after birth:
At
the age of fifteen I had my child….Alas! my child–God came into my life, but
His playthings were not ready for Him. He came to the mother’s heart, but the
mother’s heart lagged behind. He left me in anger; and ever since I have been
searching for Him up and down the world. 6
The
son is so much a part of the mother’s being that she loves him, not because he
is beautiful or good, but because he is her child. Of course she will now and
then punish him for his faults but we have to remember that when he weeps she
also weeps along with him! The idea of punishment comes out of depth of
affection and the mother thinks it her privilege and no one else’s to caress or
rebuke him. She proudly feels,
I alone have a right to blame and
punish, for he only may chastise who loves.
If
this is the intensity of feeling that the mother has towards her child, is he
also not full of love for her? The baby is able to fly away to heaven but why
does he not go? It is because “he loves to rest his head on his mother’s bosom,
and cannot ever bear to lose sight of her.” Again, though he has plenty of gold
and heaps of pearls,
This
dear little naked mendicant pretends to be utterly helpless, so that he may beg
for mother’s wealth of love.
He is a master of
wisdom, yet,
The
one thing he wants is to learn mother’s words from mother’s lips. That is why
he looks so innocent.
Binoy-bhushan,
in Gora, a modest, bright and highly educated young man looked upon
Anandamoyi as mother and his affectionate regard for her was such that she was
to him “the image of all the mothers in the world.” Once, feeling sorry for not
having treated his visit to her as the very first thing to do on his arrival in
Calcutta, he went to her place and prostrated himself at her feet with the cry,
“Mother!” “Binoy!” she said, caressing his bowed head with her hands. And the
poet asks,
Whose
voice is like that of a mother’s? The very sound of his name uttered by
Anandamoyi seemed to soothe his whole being.
On
another occasion, when the lady was in a depressed state of mind–it was a
gloomy afternoon also–with a view to distract her attention from sorrow, he
took her to the verandah in front of his room , and, making her sit down on the
mat and tell him stories of her childhood, cried:
Mother!
I can’t even think that there was ever a time when you were not our mother! I
believe that the students of your grandfather’s school used to look upon you as
there tiny little mother, and that it was really you who had to bring up your
grandfather!
He
went a step further when, the next evening, lying on a mat with his head
resting on Anandamoyi’s lap, he said:
Mother,
I sometimes wish that I could give back to God all my book learning and take
refuge in this lap of yours as a child once more–with only you in the whole
world, you and no one else but You.
A
poet of devotion, a scholar well versed in all the Sastras (Branches of
knowledge), and a most famous religious preacher, Sankara, assumes a similar
child-like humility when he begs for the Mother’s blessing:
Annapurne
sadapoorne Sankarapranavallabhe!
Jnana
vairagya siddhyarttham bhiksham dehi cha parvati.
(Giver
of Food, Goddess of Plenty, Great Siva’s Beloved Consort, Daughter of the King
of Mountains, Dear Mother, give me food; give me the food of
wisdom and the spirit of renunciation.)
Thus
we have in The Crescent Moon, as elsewhere in Tagore’s works, a most
exalted conception of the kinship existing between the child and the mother.
But the poet, who is as alive to the realities of life as he is idealistic,
knows that by and by the parents and their children should drift in the stream
of the world. The latter will have, as time goes on, their new activities and
new playmates and may not be able to spare time or thought for the old parents.
It is pathetic, no doubt, but they have their consolation.
The
river runs swift with a song, breaking through all barriers. But the mountain
stays and remembers and follows her with his love. 7
Careless and
ungrateful sons we have seen, but a parent without love it is hard to imagine.
Sankaracharya pays his greatest tribute to the Eternal Mother when he implores
Her forgiveness for any negligence on his part:
Vidher
ajnanena dravinavirahena alasataya
Vidheyasakyatvat
lava chliranyorya chyutir abhut
Tadetat
kshantavyam janani sakaloddharini sive
Kuputro
jayeta kwachidapi kumala na bhavati.
(Due
to an error of Fate or my poverty, laziness, or inability to be ever devoted to
you, there has been a slipping off thy holy feet. Beloved Mother, Auspicious
One, Saviour of the world, pardon, pardon this remissness. There may be born in
the world a wicked son but is there anywhere an unkind mother?)
Rabindranath
not only gives us the charm and Sweetness of childhood but also reads a lot of
meaning into it. In his poems and short stories dealing with children there is
often an element of symbolism. In The Crescent Moon, the mother whose
aim in life is to make her child happy by prodding him with all nice and
attractive things says:
When
I bring you coloured toys, my child, I understand why there is such a play of
colours on clouds, on water, and why flowers are painted in tints–when I give
coloured toys to you, my child.
When
I bring sweet things to your greedy hands, I know why there is honey in the cup
of the flower, and why fruits are secretly filled with juice–when I bring sweet
things to your greedy hands.
God
is our mother and all the good things of life and all the pleasing sights and
sounds in Nature are intended for our happiness and we would be fools not to
avail ourselves of it. The little son, in the course of his talk, reveals to
his mother his ambition:
Mother,
if you don’t mind, I should like to become the boatman of the ferry when I am
grown up.
Does
this not mean that it is the child that enables the mother to cross the mighty
ocean of life’s troubles? The child is the centre of the mother’s thoughts, the
God whom she enthrones in her heart, and her love for the little angel is the
only rock on which she can stand amidst the quicksand’s of life. In another
place the child who sees through the open window the
watchman walking up and down discloses to us the one great desire of his life:
I
wish I were a watchman walking the streets all night, chasing the shadows with
my lantern.
Did
not Tagore the poet keep vigil over his nation’s activities and did not Mahatma
Gandhi call him The Great Sentinel? Thus in Rabindranath’s work there is a
deeper meaning than the average reader is aware of, and it is this spirituality
that gives his poetry a unique place in the literature of the world. In The
Post Office, Amal, a young boy whom Madhav adopted, is shut up in a room
for he is “ill.” He is longing to go out of doors to see the green hills, the
open meadows, the sugar-cane fields, the grazing cattle, the men crossing the
river, and thinks he will be cured the moment this is permitted. He implores
his uncle to allow him at least to sit in the window to see the boys at play,
the girl selling flowers, and the dairyman crying, “Curds, curds, fine curds.”
The unfortunate boy who, owing to the stupidity of his uncle and his medical
adviser, cannot see the larger life outside gets worse day by day, and when he
learns, from the watchman, who strikes up the gong of Time which waits for none
but goes on for ever and of the land that none has seen, says:
Then
I suppose no one has ever been there! Oh, I do wish to fly with the time to
that land of which no one knows anything.
Words
which remind us of Shakespeare’s “undiscovered country” and Marlowe’s lines in Edward
II,
Weep
not for Mortimer,
That
scorns the world, and, as a traveller,
Goes
to discover countries yet unknown.
And
the freedom-loving little boy, who hears of the King’s Post Office planted in
front of his house and eagerly looks forward to receive the King’s letter,
obtains his deliverance when, on the advice of the Royal Physician, the room is
darkened but for the star-light streaming in and he drops asleep and passes
into the Infinite. The hero of one of his short stories, Phatik 8,
is a young lad who, happening to be with his uncle, away from his own mother,
does not feel quite at home in the new sphere, despite the uncle’s great
affection. The aunt, however, not taking kindly to him, the boy longs for his
sweet home and dear mother, but has to wait till the holidays come. His longing
is so great that he falls ill and is plunged into a delirium which is unbroken
but for his occasional question, “Uncle, have the holidays come yet?” At last
the mother arrives in a state of sorrow whose depths it is not easy to fathom;
and flinging herself on the bed, cries, “Phatik, my darling, my darling.” The
boy, as though in response to it, opens his eyes for the last time, and
murmuring, “Mother, the holidays have come,” shuts his eyes in eternal sleep.
The reader cannot but be struck with the idea that this is
symbolical of the career of the human soul, which sleeps after life’s fitful
fever, and which is not at rest till it goes to its mother’s bosom–the place
whence it came.
Childhood,
in Rabindranath’s opinion, is synonymous with innocence and wisdom and that is
why ‘God waits for man to regain his childhood in wisdom.’ 9 Man,
however learned he may be, will have, if he wants to fulfill his mission in
life, to shed his pride and follow the child’s ways. It was this message that
was taught to humanity nearly twenty centuries ago by one of the greatest of
the world’s prophets: “Except ye be converted and become as little children, ye
shall not enter the kingdom of heaven.” Ruskin of nineteenth century England;
the champion of the poor labourer and the opponent of capitalism, is so
enthusiastic for this biblical message that he makes it the text of his address
to the workers of England. 10 He thinks “wise work is cheerful, as a
child’s work is.” And he analyses the child’s character into four things:
Humility, Faith, Charity and Cheerfulness. Children are modest and are eager to
learn, not to teach. In the next place, they have absolute trust in their
parents, just as a true soldier offers implicit obedience to his captain.
Thirdly, they are full of love. “Give a little love to a child,” says Ruskin,
“and you get a great deal back.” Lastly, Children
are always ready for play, which is a lesson to the human being to do his work
in the spirit of play and taking no thought for the morrow. So, men, whatever
their eminence or station in life, will have “to repent into childhood, to
repent into delight and delightsomeness.” Rabindranath intends to impress a
similar truth on us when he makes the mother in The Crescent Moon exhort
mankind thus:
They
clamour and fight, they doubt and despair, they know no end to their
wranglings.
Go
and stand amidst their scowling hearts, my child, and let your gentle eyes fall
upon them, like the forgiving peace of the evening over the strife of the day.
Let
them see your face, my child, and thus know the meaning of all things; let them
love you and thus love each other.
The
poet is a great optimist and feels that in the birth of every new babe two
truths are revealed to the world. To quote his own words,
Every
child comes with the message that God is not yet discouraged of man;
God
grows weary of great kingdoms but never of little flowers.
It
must not, however, be forgotten that most of us cannot realise the truth of
this, though is looks so simple. In The Fugitive there is an
imaginary conversation between Mind and the Poet who were told that something
great was to come. The former, with a view to accord a fitting reception to the
new-comer, was making preparations without end by way of gathering things and
building towers, and every one was eagerly looking forward to the coming. At
last the herald appeared and, while Mind was worried that the building had not
been quite finished, a voice from the sky said, “Pull down
your building. Because today is the day of coming, and your building is in the
way.” The construction which was huge was reduced to dust
but what did they see? Only the morning star and the lily washed in dew. Also,
a child running, laughing from its mother’s arms into the open light! Naturally
Mind asked in astonishment:
And
did they claim all the earth only for this?
but
the answer was:
Yes.
Mind, you build walls to imprison yourself. Your servants toil to enslave
themselves; but the whole earth and infinite space are for
the child, for the New Life.
There
was a second question, “What does that child bring you?” to which the reply
was, “Hope for all the world, and its joy.” That even “the
wise” may not readily grasp the full meaning of this, the following will show:
Mind
asked me, “Poet, do you understand?”
“I
lay my work aside,” I said, “For I must have time to understand.”
Poetry
of childhood has always been very popular in India. From the most ancient
times, we have had poets and dramatists devoting their attention to the child’s
life and, in many of the religious stories of Hinduism, Vishnu, the Ruler of
the Universe, has been represented as Sri Krishna, the little, blue-coloured,
cowherd boy. His childish tastes, tricks and games have so fascinated poets that
one of them says:
Saiva
vayam na khalu tatra vicharaniyam
Panchakshaijapapara
nitaram tathaapi
Chela
madiyam atasikusumavabhasam
Smerananam
smarati gopavadhukisoram. 11
(We
were worshippers of Siva but why talk about it now? True, we used to recite
with ardent devotion the five-lettered prayer. But my mind thinks now of none
other than the cowherd’s charming little son with his face full of smiles and
shining like the linseed flower.)
The
beauty of that little form is so bewitching that the poet feels that his heart
is drawn to it as a piece of iron to a magnet:
Madhuryaadapi
madhuram Manmathatatasya kimapi kaisoram
Chapavaadapi
chapalam chela mama harati hanta kim kurmaha.
(Sweeter
than sweetness is the childhood which is beyond description. Swifter than
swiftness as my mind is, it is stolen away. Alas! How helpless!)
We
are told that Sri Krishna, like all little children, was specially fond of
cream and butter, so much so that he has earned at the hands of his devotees a
great title, Navaneetachora (Stealer of Butter). Butter is the
essence of milk...man’s nourishment in life...and the softest thing on earth.
Is not the title appropriate when we know that the Eternal Child is really the
stealer of the softest thing in creation...the human heart?
In
his interpretation of childhood, as in other things relating to his poetry,
Rabindranath is a mystic. It is rather difficult to define mysticism exactly,
for it is not a creed or a system of philosophy. Every great poet is a kind of
mystic, and can dive into things the meaning of which the common man cannot see
or appreciate. With Tagore, the universe is a garb of the divine. He says:
The
same stream of life that runs through my veins night and day runs through the
world and dances in rhythmic measures.
It
is the same life that shoots in joy through the dust of the earth in numberless
blades of grass and breaks into tumultuous waves of leaves and flowers. 12
Fools
as we are, we generally think that, God being far from us, we must go in search
of Him. The poet shows:
We
do not have to run to the grocer’s shop for our morning light; we open our eyes
and there it is; so we need only give ourselves up to find that Brahma is
everywhere. 13
To
him, as to every real philosopher of the world, the One remains, the Many
change and pass. He is always anxious to see Unity amidst Diversity, for he
prays that he may never “lose the bliss of the touch of the One in the play of
the many.” Like the sages of ancient India, he is able to realise God in
himself when he says:
My
poet, is it thy delight to see thy creation through my eyes and to stand at the
portals of my ears silently to listen to thine own eternal harmony?
Thou
givest thyself to me in love and then feelest thine own entire sweetness in me.
14
He
shows how the greater part of the literature of India is religious, the reason
being that God with us is not a distant God. He is in our homes as in our
temples, and we feel his nearness to us in all our human relationships. “In the
woman who is good we feel Him, in the man who is true we know Him, in our
children He is born again and again, the Eternal Child.” 15
1 V.
Mini in the story of The Cabuliwallah asking her father:
What
do you think, father? Bhola says there is an elephant in the clouds, blowing
water out of his trunk, and that is why it rains!
………………………………………………
Father!
What relation is Mother to you?
2 The
story of The Child’s Return
3 Spoken
in connection with the Maghotsava celebrated on January 25,
1938;
4
My life; A lecture delivered in China in 1924.
5 The
poet was seventy-eight years old at the time.
6
The story of The Devotee.
7 The
Crescent Moon.
8
The Home Coming
9 Stray
Birds
10 The
Crown of Wild Olive
11 The
prayer which reads Namassivaya consists of five letters in Sanskrit and
its meaning is, “Salutations to Thee, O Siva!
12 Gitanjali
13 Sadhana
14 Gitanjali
15 Personality