THE LOVE POETRY OF TAGORE

By M. C. GABRIEL

The ‘Gitanjali’ envisages a merging, by mystical elevation, of the human in the Divine, the impermanent in the Permanent. It gathered supreme importance, both in the public mind and the Poet’s immortality, to the neglect, comparatively, of his other works and their range.

Among the latter are Tagore’s exquisite love-lyrics, which are only referred to, by authors, in passing. Much of poetry expresses the passion of love in a kind of ecstatic outburst. The poet, in the capacity of a lover, sings the feelings of his heart in a burning poem. He tells the beloved of hill distress in her absence, his consuming desire to always have her in his sight, his fear and trepidation at her silence, his soul’s threnody at being rejected or crossed. But the poems of Tagore are a class by themselves. They may not be startlingly new in the Indian tradition, but, in the West, save for a hint in Thomas Hardy, there is no tradition of writing poems in his style, whose characteristic beauty–a beauty which finds greater definition and dignity in his mystical verse–is, what may be called, the capture of a moment or a phase of emotion.

A guileless youth may fall a prey to Cupid’s dart when still a boy of fourteen or even younger, and try to soar to Parnassus for help. The early poems of Byron, some of Shelley’s juvenile scribblings, are a couple of instances in point. They are romantic ravings of transparent sincerity, heightened by the blind sexual effervescence of adolescence, and cramped in the trappings of an ununderstood idealism. But with age, in fact with every minute, the emotion change, having gained by experience and introspection what can be within the space of that time.

“But I can tell–let truth be told–

That love will change in growing old,

Though day by day is naught to see,

So delicate hid motions be.” (Bridges)

And so, at a later date, the person begins to discover how differently the text of love then reads. That, perhaps, is one of the reasons for a prevalent idea that a person falls in love but once in his life, his other affaires d’amore being considered purely on th6 basis of sex.

Tagore’s love poetry not only brings out this difference in the growth of feelings with remarkable insight and subtlety, but also captures the fleeting moments of the passion as it expresses itself in a certain state of mind with a multitude of associations. For love is a state of maximum expansion of the ego. In that state of intoxication familiarly called love, the entire atmosphere becomes instinct with life and meaning. The lover (man or woman) projects his or her heightened consciousness on all things animate and inanimate. The stars, the sky, its colour and clouds, the trees, the birds, the flower and fruit, the winds and weathers, all suddenly acquire a meaning. The stars are either cruel in their Courses or benevolent and worthy of trust; the sky changes its colours either with cold, indifferent beauty or with consoling regard; the birds are calling forlornly to their mates or are merrily wafting from branch to branch, at peace with the rest of the world.

The poems in the ‘Gardener’, as the author himself tells us in the Preface, are of ‘love and life’ and written much earlier than the ‘Gitanjali’. As an illustration of the point stated above regarding the changes in love at different times ‘we may compare the poem’ (25) “Come to us, youth, tell us truly why there is madness in your eyes”, with “We are to play the game of death tonight, my bride and I” (‘Gardener’ 82). In the first the youth ends the poem by replying, “my feet are languid with the burden of my heart.” The entire poem suggests the indolent and the idealist languor of all love at an early age. The youth has a great and enjoyable burden in his heart, and that is enough.

In the second poem, the lover speaks of his bride and himself realising love in the terrors of a storm. “The night is black, the clouds in the sky are capricious, and the waves are roaring at sea.” Her hair is flying in the wind, her veil is fluttering, her garland rustles over her breast.”

“The push of death has swung her into life.

We are face to face and heart to heart, my bride and I.”

Again, poems Nos. 7 and 56 (‘Gardener’) show two very different phases of love which Tagore tries to express. In the first it is all a mere adolescent love at first sight. “But the young Prince did pass by our door and I flung the jewel from my breast before his path.” From her window the girl sees the Prince pass and flings both her necklace and the jewel from her breast (i.e. her heart) before him.

In the second, love is an old acquaintance with strange vagaries in his behaviour. He comes like a harsh light, drags the trembling heart into the open, tears all reserve and modesty to shreds and then abandons the once beloved, leaving greater darkness and sorrow behind. The woman who had been working with others has fallen a victim to his ruse. She responds and perhaps enjoys. And then, “I hoped my love would be saved from the shivering shame of the shelterless, but you turn your face away.” Here are lines spoken not by a chit of a girl, whose heart is borne away by the splendour of a Prince, but spoken by a woman, who has known all the pleasures of womanhood and love in their maturity. And suddenly he has turned away his face. In the closing lines, how clearly and with what unbearable poignance–poignance intensified by the resigned and hopeless spirit in which they are spoken–all this and much more are brought out:

“Yes, your path lies open before you, but you have cut off return, and left me stripped naked before the world with its lidless eyes staring night and day.”

Both in the ‘Gardener’ and the ‘Lover’s Gift’ (the latter is unfortunately not translated by the author himself) several poems can be found which bear out the idea given above. However, there are a greater number of matured poems and comparatively fewer of the adolescent, perhaps because, at the time of translation, Tagore preferred the reality of the former to the nebulous beauty of the latter.

We shall now illustrate at some length what we meant by Tagore’s capture of the moment and the mood.

“The two sisters glance at each other when they come to this spot and they smile.

“There is laughter in their swift-stepping feet, which makes confusion in somebody’s mind who stands behind the trees whenever they go to fetch water.” (‘Gardener’, 18)

Here is not a mere poetic expression of the feelings of a particular person. It may be that the poem brings out the characteristic shyness of a maiden, who knows she is within her lover’s sight. But then, there are shades and shades of shyness. In poem No 8 of the ‘Gardener’ when she is seated by her window, the young traveller comes to her ‘in the rosy mist of the morning’ and asks her, with an eager cry, “Where is she?” The answer is known to her but–

“For very shame, I could not say

She is I, young traveller, she is I.”

“Day after day he comes and goes away.

Go, and give him a flower from my hair, my friend.

If he asks who was it that sent it,

I entreat you do not tell him my name–

For he only comes and goes away.”

How delightfully absurd that her name should not be revealed to Him, “for he only comes and goes away!” But it is only in such meaningless little absurdities that Tagore manages to capture the fleeting moments of betrayal of a woman’s heart, by herself. In the above quoted poems, the woman betrays her secret by her shyness, in various phases of its expression. The shyness in the glance between two sisters and their meaningful smile, because somebody stands behind the trees whenever they go to fetch water, is incomparably different from the shyness which successfully stifles the rebellious words just behind her lips, “She is I, young traveller, she is I!” And without the entire context in which the idea is expressed, the feeling would lack completion and the subtle differentiating shade.

Let us take another poem as an illustration:

“When she passed by me with quick steps, the end of her skirt touched me.

“From the unknown island of a heart came a sudden warm breath of spring.

“A flutter of a flitting touch brushed me and vanished in a moment, like a torn flower-petal blown in the breeze.

“It fell upon my heart like a sigh of her body and whisper of her heart.” (‘Gardener’, 22)

The poet intends to convey the sudden emotion as it sprang in him. The words employed are exquisite and expressive. The emotion is healthy and animal, awakened to life by the touch of the end of her skirt. As a painter, with a few strokes of his brush, brings his figures into bold relief, the poet, by a few unforgettable metaphors, prepares the reader for a complete and sympathetic appreciation of the pathetically stormy feeling of the last line, “It fell upon my heart like the sigh of her body and whisper of her heart”. (Incidentally, the sound of this line is marred by the too close repetition of the heart’).

At the end of this poem the reader feels it, not as a vague and general idea of love, but as a robust and expressive, phase or mood of emotion. It is that that I have called the capture of the fleeting moment and the mood. The emotion expressed may return but always with a change, and in a new moment and a new mood. The world is full of sunshine half the time of the day, and yet a lonely ray stretches itself and strays into dark corners and is caught and imprisoned within a diamond. So also in this poem, out of the multitude, a fraction of human life and feeling is singled out and incarcerated in a cell of colour and sound.

It must have been noticed, even from the few examples we have given, that Tagore often attempts to express what passes within the minds and hearts of women. This, I believe, is another very important and contributive part of his poetry.

For various reasons women, all the world over, have been subject to social slavery. They have not been given a chance to express their personalities with freedom. Though conditions in the West have changed greatly, in India women are still in a position of social subordination. In fact the ideal of wifehood in India is the adoration of her husband us a god. Similar conditions have prevailed till very recently in China. Free talk, hearty joking and loud laughter by women, even in their homes, are still a matter for grave concern. Whatever the desires that may burn within a woman’s heart, she ought, if she would be considered moral and modest, to refrain from expressing them. So, half the world has spoken, the other has yet to speak, and naturally woman has been made a mystery. “Who knows,” the protagonists of this social injustice and cruelty wonder, “what unknown and unknowable wells of love and hatred bubble within a woman…..” and so on ad nauseam, as if, given a fair chance, she could not be as inhumanly human as man generally is! Mankind put her on a pedestal, adored her for a goddess and neatly muzzled her mouth. It is extremely absorbing to analyse why this has been and how it has evolved, but this is not the place for it.

Against this background Tagore attempts to explore ‘mysterious woman’, and makes her express her innermost thoughts. There is no such practice in poetical literature of any respectable proportion. Man has always spoken of himself, his love, his ardour, his achievements and what not. Here and there we find a stray poetess or woman-painter, trying her best, in the ridiculous guise of conventional forms, to express herself vaguely and with restraint. The poems spoken by women in India are largely of a religious character. The only notable exception is found among those whom we complacently allude to as the tribal peoples: the Ghonds, the Pardhis etc. Their poems, both by men and women, are extremely free expression and direct in thought. Tagore also has tried to make woman articulate and has achieved astonishing success. He almost gets beneath their skin. Their coyness, their vague fear of love, their utter and perilous abandonment in moments of passion, their confusion at the glance of their lover, their predilection for flattery, their betrayal through care to conceal, are all brought out with remarkable insight and delicacy, with an eye to womanly restraint.

Somewhere, in one of his prose writings, Tagore himself deplores paucity of such poems. Though, in his translated works, the proportion of such poems is very small in comparison with others, yet it sets a tradition worth emulation, both in method and character. It must be remembered that it is a particularly difficult type for men poets to attempt. Lyric poetry being the communication of very intimate and personal experience, objectivity is difficult to attain. A love lyric is therefore bound to be ecstatic and subjective, endeavouring to communicate a certain phase or mood of our emotion or mind toward love. It is for this very good reason that lyrics are mostly written in the first person. Although, all the poet does, in writing love lyrics spoken by women, is to express his own feelings as if they belonged to the ‘fair sex’, or to express in a particular state of mind what ideas or emotions he presumes are theirs, yet such an attempt demands objectivity enough to consistently use the woman’s code and symbolism and to maintain certain fundamental differences between man and woman. And the poems of Tagore are worked out even in this respect to a nicety.

“I try to weave a wreath all the morning, but the flowers slip and they drop out.

“You sit there watching me in secret through the corner of your prying eyes.

“Ask those eyes, darkly planning mischief, whose fault it was.” (‘Gardener’, 39.)

But such subtlety characterises almost all the poems of Tagore, whether of love or any other feeling. Every stanza ends in this pointed manner, only to attain greater intensity in the subsequent stanzas. His poems move in a crescendo, the final stanza ending in a great wave, which soars to its full height and is left there. Perhaps it is an urge for a climax or the modern trend to bring all things to a crashing finish for effect.

Although I do not intend to deal here with the outlook of Tagore on, or his attitude to, love; yet in connexion with his love poems. I might risk a few remarks on the idealist disappointment in some of them. The experiences of the body are shorter if tangibly more in tense, while those of the mind or heart are more enduring, and perhaps because the mind is a more specialised form of matter than the body, its experiences are on a more specialised if not higher plane. It may be that the passion of love has its origin entirely in the appetites of the body and is a subtler and more restrained form of their expression, but it is also an attitude of the mind developed through ages under the pressure of certain socio-sexual inhibitions functioning for the solidarity of society, which inculcates the idea of the sanctity of monogamy, to finally assume the dignity of a hunger for in intellectual companionship.

This attitude of the mind is foredoomed to disappointment, for the limitations of a personality are precise, permitting of negligible elasticity, but the illusions of the mind are illimitable. It is not so much familiarity that breeds contempt as the inflexibility of our pre-conceived notions. The pious virgin may turn over a shameless and incorrigible voluptuary, and the implacable misogenist the ideal husband. But all these risks are a part of the perilously delightful game of love and marriage, and only the brave deserve the fair. The disappointment of Tagore which is not very unique (it is in fact a fairly common experience among poets), is the failure of a union in love above mere mating: a kind of spiritual oneness.

“Love, my heart longs day and night for the meeting with you–for the meeting that is like all-devouring death,

“Sweep me away like a storm; take everything I have: break open my sleep and plunder my dreams. Rob me of my world.

“In that devastation, in the utter nakedness of spirit, let us become one in beauty.” (‘Gardener’, 50)

He tries to possess the loveliness of the beloved, only to discover that he is shadow-grasping. “How can the body touch the flower which only the spirit may touch?” That again is the disappointment of the mind or spirit to unite, through the body, with the mind or spirit of the beloved.

“I hold her hands and press her to my breast.

“I try to fill my arms with her loveliness, to plunder her sweet smile with kisses, to drink her dark glances with my eyes.

“Ah, but where is it? Who can strain the blue from the sky?….(‘Gardener’. 49.)

The words used express the desire to posses abstractions in the concrete, to plunder the beauty of a smile by kisses, or the beauty of form by touch. The cumulative effect of the parts of a personality is its attraction or repulsion. Tagore, not satisfied with the personality, is striving to capture within his hands the effect and naturally is disappointed. “Who can strain the blue from the sky?” It is ultimately the scientific failure of matter to explain its effect upon the responsive and sentient organism!

It is obviously difficult to make an essay exhaustive within certain limits. Every poem in the ‘Gardener’ and the ‘Lover’s Gift’ is exquisite. The more one reads them, the more is one inclined to read them again. It is worth pondering what the poems that in the translation (which, as someone remarked, is at best wearing a coat inside out) convey so much and thrill the heart, must be in the original. In his introduction to the ‘Gitanjali’, Yeats incidentally mentions that his Indian friends tell him, these lyrics, “are in the original...full of subtlety of rhythm, of untranslatable delicacies of colour, of metrical invention...” But we might be grateful that Tagore translated his poems at all. The translation itself is so well done, in fidelity to the spirit of their original, that Yeats did not scruple to include in his compilation of an Oxford Anthology of Modern English Verse, a couple of poems from Tagore.

It is, on the whole, superfluous to praise Tagore. He is securely ensconced in the Pantheon of the world’s immortal poets. But his immortality has been severely one-sided. One reason for this is that Tagore’s religious and mystical poems borrow the symbolism of the lover and the beloved. It is usually contended that it is bound to be so, because human expression, which is conditioned and limited to the five senses, is insufficient for the communication of experiences beyond mind and matter. It is not without reason therefore that there are critics who claim a mystical character and import for the otherwise popularly downright epicurean ‘Rubbaiyat’ of Khayam. Although Tagore is clear as to the nature of his beloved or lover, and the very first lines are enough to differentiate a poem of mystical ecstasy from one of mundane human love, yet there is at times not a little cause for confusion. For instance, the poem referred to earlier, which speaks of the young Prince and the maid who threw the jewel from her breast before his path, lends itself perfectly to mystical construction. Again, critics of varied skill and insight have tried to assess the philosophical content and contribution of Tagore’s poems and have invariably laid so much stress upon his greatness as a mystical poet, that in the common mind he has come to be associated with message, vision, intuition and other not very easily comprehensible ideas. His other writings also bear the stamp of his genius. If they do not convey messages and sing to you of those moments of communion with an eternal and immanent spirit manifesting itself in every item of creation, to the eye that has the power to see and the mind that has the breadth to conceive, they still are close to the heart, for they speak of the commoner experiences, the joys and sorrows, the laughter and tears, which are the lot of every man.

It is true that these poems do not have that which so pleases the distracted minds of the old and broken, and also there is not in them the mellow richness which comes with age. These early poems are full of the faults, if one would care to see, of the unreasonable dementia of the youthful mind. In his exuberance of heart, the poet crowds his early poems with deoorations in simile and metaphor, and colour and language, not common to ordinary man. There is talk of princes and pearls, chariots and horses foaming at the mouth: bodices of the colour of the peacock’s throat and mantles green as young grass, kingdoms and queens, drunken bees and dew-drops on lotus leaves, moonlit nights and jasmine wreaths, that thrill to the heart like praise in a riot of extravagance. What among these can match the simplicity and sparseness of the poems of his ‘Gitanjali’? In the latter, the fever is gone, the flesh is as good as dead, and only the spirit or mind in an ecstasy soars and sings. And yet, to those of the common run of humanity, the poems of love and life touch a more sympathetic chord, for they (poems) do not speak of the realm of experiences the spirit, but they bring back to the mind the more commonly shared joys and the more widely known disappointments and sorrows of men. The ordinary men, uninitiated in the mysteries of spirit, is naturally impatient of mysticism, as so much high-brow pedantry Poetry, which is not taken to very kindly by most men because it is not straightforward and downright prose, becomes anathema when all it conveys is beyond normal experience. It beats men’s understanding, and beaten men have no praise for their opponents, though they may be awed into respecting.

Tagore’s reputation as a mystical poet scares away the more humble and less gifted if not less sensible men, who would like their poet to be their own selves articulate. It is enough if the thoughts that are, or might be, theirs in a conceivable situation, are clothed in gorgeous words and figures, or set to music, for then is touched within them a kindred chord. I am one with the general opinion regarding the greatness of the religious poems of Tagore, and it is not my intention to either speak disparagingly of them or to detract from their greatness, but only to add to that well-deserved coronal a yet unnoticed wreath, which might meritedly crown his head!

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