<html>

<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=windows-1252">
<title>Kabindranath Tagore</title>
</head>

<body>

<table border="0" width="100%" cellpadding="6" style="border-collapse: collapse">
	<tr>
		<td>
		<p align="center" style="line-height: 150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0">
<b>
<i>Rabindranath Tagore:</i>&nbsp;
<i>A Great Poet, A Great Man</i> </b>
		<p style="line-height: 150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0" align="justify">&nbsp;</p>

<p style="line-height: 150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0" align="justify">
<font face="Times New Roman">TAGORE is a great poet: he will be remembered as one of the</font>

<font face="Times New Roman">greatest world-poets. But humanity owes him another—perhaps a greater—debt of gratitude: his name has a higher
value, a more significant potency for the future.</font>

<p style="line-height: 150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0" align="justify">
<font face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; In an age when Reason was considered as the highest light
given to man, Tagore pointed to the Vision of the mystics as
always the still greater light; when man was elated with un-
dreamt-of worldly success; puffed up with incomparable
material possessions and powers, Tagore's voice rang clear
and emphatic in tune with the cry of the ancients: &quot;What
shall I do with all this mass of things, if I am not made immortal by that?&quot; When men, in their individual as well as
collective egoism, were scrambling for earthly gains and hoards,
he held before them vaster and cleaner horizons, higher and
deeper ways of being and living, maintained the sacred sense
of human solidarity, the living consciousness of the Divine,
one and indivisible. When the Gospel of Power had all but
hypnotised men's minds, and Superman or God-man came to
be equated with the Titan, Tagore saw through the falsehood
and placed in front and above all the old-world eternal verities
of love and self-giving, harmony and mutuality, sweetness and
light. When pessimism, cynicism, agnosticism struck the
major chord of human temperament, and grief and frustration
and death and decay were taken as a matter of course to be the
inevitable order of earthly life—<i>bhasmantam idam shariram—
</i>he continued to sing the song of the Rishis that Ananda and
Immortality are the breath of things, the birthright of human
beings. When Modernism declared with a certitude never to</font>

		<p style="line-height: 150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0" align="center">
Page 369<hr>

<p style="line-height: 150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0" align="justify">
<font face="Times New Roman">be contested that Matter is Brahman, Tagore<b> 
</b>said with the<b> 
</b>voice of one who knows that Spirit is Brahman.</font>

<p style="line-height: 150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0" align="justify">
<font face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Tagore is in direct line with those bards who have sung of
the Spirit; who always soared high above the falsehoods and
uglinesses of a merely mundane life and lived in the undecaying-delights and beauties of a diviner consciousness. Spiritual
reality was the central theme of his poetic creation: only and
naturally he viewed it in a special way and endowed it with a
special grace. We know of another God-intoxicated man, the
Jewish philosopher Spinoza, who saw things <i>sub specie aeternitatis,</i> under the figure or mode of eternity. Well, Tagore can
be said to see things, in their essential spiritual reality, under
the figure or mode of beauty. Keats indeed spoke of truth
being beauty and beauty truth. But there is a great difference
in the outlook and inner experience. A worshipper of beauty,
unless he rises to the Upanishadic norm, is prone to become
sensuous and pagan. Keats was that, Kalidasa was that, even
Shelley was not far different. The spiritual vein in all these
poets remains secondary. In the old Indian master, it is part
of his intellectual equipment, no doubt, but nothing much
more than that. In the other two it comes in as strange flashes
from an unknown country, as a sort of irruption or on the peak
of the poetic afflatus or <i>enthousiasmos.</i></font>

<p style="line-height: 150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0" align="justify">
<font face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; The world being nothing but Spirit made visible is, 
according to Tagore, fundamentally a thing of beauty. The scars and
spots that are on the surface have to be removed and mankind
has to repossess and clothe itself with that mantle of beauty.
The world is beautiful, because it is the image of the Beautiful,
because it harbours, expresses and embodies the Divine who
is Beauty supreme. Now by a strange alchemy, a wonderful
effect of polarisation, the very spiritual element in Tagore
has made him almost a pagan and even a profane. For what
are these glories of Nature and the still more exquisite glories
that the human body has captured? They are but vibrations
and modulations of beauty—the delightful names and forms
of the supreme Lover and Beloved.</font>

<p style="line-height: 150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0" align="justify">
<font face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Socrates is said to have brought down Philosophy from
Heaven to live among men upon earth. A similar exploit can
be ascribed to Tagore. The Spirit, the bare transcendental
Reality contemplated by the orthodox Vedantins, has been</font>
		<p style="line-height: 150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0" align="center">
Page 370<hr>

<p style="line-height: 150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0" align="justify">
<font face="Times New Roman">brought nearer to our planet, close to human consciousness in
Tagore's vision, being clothed in earth and flesh and blood,
made vivid with the colours and contours of the physical existence. The Spirit, yes and by all means, but not necessarily
asceticism and monasticism. So Tagore boldly declared in
those famous lines of his:</font>

<p style="line-height: 150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0" align="justify">
<font face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Mine is not the deliverance achieved through mere
renunciation. Mine rather the freedom that tastes itself
in a thousand associations.<sup>1</sup></font><sup> </sup>

<p style="line-height: 150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0" align="justify">
<font face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; The spirit of the age demands this new gospel. Mankind
needs and awaits a fresh revelation. The world and life are
not an illusion or a lesser reality: they are, if taken rightly, as real as the 
pure Spirit itself. Indeed, Spirit and Flesh, Consciousness and Matter are not antinomies; to consider them as
such is itself an illusion. In fact, they are only two poles or
modes or aspects of the same reality. To separate or divide
them is a one-sided concentration or abstraction on the part of
the human mind. The fulfilment of the Spirit is in its expression
through Matter; human life too reaches its highest term, its <i>summum bonum,</i> in embodying the spiritual consciousness here
on earth and not dissolving itself in the Transcendence. That
is the new Dispensation which answers to the deepest aspiration in man and towards which he has been travelling through
the ages in the course of the evolution of his consciousness.
Many, however, are the prophets and sages who have set this .
ideal before humanity and more and more insistently and
clearly as we come nearer to the age we live in. But none or .
very few have expressed it with such beauty and charm and
compelling persuasion. It would be carping criticism to point
out—as some, purists one may call them, have done—that in
poetising and aesthetising the spiritual truth and reality, in
trying to make it human and terrestrial, he has diminished
and diluted the original substance, in endeavouring to render
the diamond iridescent, he has turned it into a baser alloy.
Tagore's is a poetic soul, it must be admitted; and it is not
necessary that one should find in his ideas and experiences
and utterances the cent per cent accuracy and inevitability of</font>

		<p style="line-height: 150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0" align="justify">
&nbsp;<p style="line-height: 150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0" align="justify">
<font size="2" face="Times New Roman">1Deliverance is not for me in renunciation. I feel the embrace of freedom<br>
in a thousand bonds of delight.&quot; —<i>Gitanjali,</i> 73.</font><font size="2">
</font>
		<p style="line-height: 150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0" align="center">
Page 371<hr>

<p style="line-height: 150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0" align="justify">
<font face="Times New Roman">a Yogic consciousness. Still&nbsp; his major perceptions, those that 
count, stand and are borne out by the highest spiritual realisation.</font>

<p style="line-height: 150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0" align="justify">
<font face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Tagore is no inventor or innovator when he posits Spirit as
Beauty, the spiritual consciousness as the ardent rhythm of
ecstasy. This experience is the very core of Vaishnavism and
for which Tagore is sometimes called a Neo-Vaishnava. The
Vaishnava sees the world pulsating in glamorous beauty as
the Lila (Play) of the Lord, and the Lord, God himself, is
nothing but Love and Beauty. Still Tagore is not all Vaishnava
or merely a Vaishnava; he is in addition a modern (the carping <br>
voice will say, there comes the dilution and adulteration)
—in the sense that problems exist for him—social, political,
economic, national, humanitarian—which have to be faced
and solved: these are not merely mundane,' but woven into
the texture of the fundamental problem of human destiny, of
Soul and Spirit and God. A Vaishnava was, in spite of his
acceptance of the world, an <i>introvert,</i> to use a modern psychological phrase, not necessarily in the pejorative sense, but in
the neutral scientific sense. He looks upon the universe and
human life as the play of the Lord, as an actuality and not
mere illusion indeed; but he does not participate or even take
interest in the dynamic working out of the world process,
he does not care to know, has no need of knowing that there
is a terrestrial purpose and a diviner fulfilment of the mortal
life upon earth. The Vaishnava dwells more or less absorbed
in the Vaikuntha of his inner consciousness; the outer world,
although real, is only a symbolic shadow-play to which he can
but be a witness—real, is only a nothing more.</font>

<p style="line-height: 150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0" align="justify">
<font face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; A modern idealist of the type of a reformer would not be
satisfied with that role. If he is merely a moralist reformer, he
will revolt against the &quot;witness business&quot;, calling it a <i>laissez-
faire</i> mentality of bygone days. A spiritual reformer would
ask for more—a dynamic union with the Divine Will and
Consciousness, not merely a passive enjoyment in the Bliss, so
that he may be a luminous power or agent for the expression
of divine values in things mundane.</font>

<p style="line-height: 150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0" align="justify">
<font face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Not the acceptance of the world as it is, not even a joyous
acceptance, viewing it as an inexplicable and mysterious and
magic play of God, but the aspiration and endeavour to</font>
		<p style="line-height: 150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0" align="center">
Page 372<hr>

<p style="line-height: 150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0" align="justify">
<font face="Times New Roman">change it, mould it in the pattern of its inner divine realities—for there are such realities which seek expression and embodiment in earthly life—that is the great mission and labour of
humanity and that is all the meaning of man's existence here
below. And Tagore is one of the great prophets and labourers
who had the vision of the shape of things to come and worked
for it. Only it must be noted, as I have already said, that un-like mere moral reformists or scientific planners, Tagore
grounded himself upon the eternal ancient truths that &quot;age
cannot wither nor custom stale&quot;—the divine truths of the Spirit.</font>

<p style="line-height: 150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0" align="justify">
<font face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Tagore was a poet; this poetic power of his he put in the
service of the great cause for the divine uplift of humanity.
Naturally, it goes without saying, his poetry did not preach
or propagandize the truths for which he stood—he had a fine
and powerful weapon in his prose to do the work, even then in
a poetic way—but to sing them. And he sang them not in
their philosophical bareness, like a Lucretius, or in their sheer
transcendental austerity like some of the Upanishadic Rishis,<br>
but in and through human values and earthly norms. The
especial aroma of Tagore's poetry lies exactly here, as he
himself says, in the note of unboundedness in things bounded
that it describes. A mundane; profane sensuousness, Kalidasian
in richness and sweetness, is matched or counterpointed by a
simple haunting note imbedded or trailing somewhere behind,
a lyric cry persevering into eternity, the nostalgic cry of the
still small voice.1</font>

<p style="line-height: 150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0" align="justify">
<font face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Thus, on the one hand, the Eternity, the Infinity, the Spirit</font>

		<p style="line-height: 150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0" align="justify">
&nbsp;<p style="line-height: 150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0" align="justify">
<font size="2" face="Times New Roman">1&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Tagore the poet reminds one often and anon of Kalidasa. He was so much in
love, had such kinship with the great old master that many of his poems, many
passages and lines are reminiscences, echoes, modulations or a paraphrase of the
original classic. Tagore himself refers in his memoirs to one Kalidasian line that
haunted his juvenile brain beacuse of its exquisite music and enchanting imagery:</font><font size="2">
</font>
		<p style="line-height: 150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0" align="justify">
&nbsp;<p align=justify style="line-height: 150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0">
<i><font size="2">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Mandakini nirjhar asikar an am vodha muhuh-kampita-deva-daruh</font></i><font size="2">&nbsp;
</font>
		<p align=justify style="line-height: 150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0">
&nbsp;<p style="line-height: 150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0" align="justify">
<font size="2" face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Winds carrying spray from the falls of Mandakini, making
deodars all astir.</font><font size="2"> </font>
		<p style="line-height: 150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0" align="justify">
&nbsp;<p style="line-height: 150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0" align="justify">
<font size="2" face="Times New Roman">Both the poets were worshippers, idolaters, of beauty, especially of natural physical
beauty, of beauty heaped on beauty, of beauty gathered, like honey from all
places and stored and ranged and stalled with the utmost decorative skill. Yet the
difference between the two is not less pronounced. A philosopher is reminded of&nbsp;
Bergson, the great exponent of movement as reality, in connection with certain
aspects of Tagore. Indeed, Beauty in Tagore is something moving, flowing, danc-
ing, rippling; it is especially the beauty which music embodies and expresses. A
Kalidasian beauty, on the contrary, is statuesque and plastic, it is to be appreciated <i>in situ.</i> This is, however, by the way.</font><font size="2">
</font>
		<p style="line-height: 150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0" align="center">
Page 373<hr>

<p style="line-height: 150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0" align="justify">
<font face="Times New Roman">is brought nearer home to us in its embodied symbols and
living vehicles and vivid formulations, it becomes easily available to mortals, even like the father to his son, to use a Vedic
phrase; on the other hand, earthly things, mere humanities
are uplifted and suffused with a &quot;light that never was, on sea
or land.&quot;</font>

<p style="line-height: 150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0" align="justify">
<font face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Another great poet of the spirit says also, almost like Tagore:</font>&nbsp;<p style="line-height: 150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0" align="justify">
&nbsp;<p style="line-height: 150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0" align="justify">
&nbsp;<font face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Cold are the rivers of peace and their banks are leafless
and lonely.<sup>1</sup></font>

		<p style="line-height: 150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0" align="justify">
&nbsp;<p style="line-height: 150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0" align="justify">
<font face="Times New Roman">and sends up this prayer:</font>

		<p style="line-height: 150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0" align="justify">
&nbsp;<p style="line-height: 150%; margin-left:30px; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0" align="justify">
<font face="Times New Roman">Earth-souls needing the touch of the heaven's peace<br>
&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
to recapture,</font>

<p style="line-height: 150%; margin-left:30px; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0" align="justify">
<font face="Times New Roman">Heaven needing earth's passion to .quiver its peace<br>
&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
into rapture.</font>

<p style="line-height: 150%; margin-left:30px; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0" align="justify">
<font face="Times New Roman">Marry, 0 lightning eternal, the passion of a moment-<br>
&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
born fire!</font>

<p style="line-height: 150%; margin-left:30px; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0" align="justify">
<font face="Times New Roman">Out of thy greatness draw close to the breast of our<br>
&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
mortal desire!</font>

		<p style="line-height: 150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0" align="justify">
&nbsp;<p style="line-height: 150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0" align="justify">
<font face="Times New Roman">This also is Tagore's soul-prayer, his deepest aspiration.</font>

		<p style="line-height: 150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0" align="justify">
&nbsp;<p style="line-height: 150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0" align="justify">
<font face="Times New Roman" size="2">1 Sri Aurobindo: &quot;Ahana&quot;, <i>Collected Poems &amp; Plays,</i> Vol. 2</font>
		<p style="line-height: 150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0" align="center">
Page 374<hr>

		<p style="line-height: 150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0" align="right"><b><font size="2"><a href="-00_Contents">
			<span style="text-decoration: none">HOME</span></a></font></b></td>
	</tr>
	</table>

</body>

</html>
