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<title>Rabindranath Tagore: A Great Poet, A
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<p align=right style='text-align:center; line-height:150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0'>
<span lang=EN style='mso-ansi-language:EN; font-weight:700'>
<font size="4">Rabindranath Tagore: A Great Poet, A
Great Man</font></span><span style='font-size:18.0pt'><o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p style='text-indent:53.0pt; line-height:150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0'><span lang=EN style='mso-ansi-language:EN'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></p>

<p style='text-align:justify;text-indent:5.4pt; line-height:150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0'><span lang=EN style='mso-ansi-language:
EN'>TAGORE is a great poet: he will be remembered as one of the I 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.<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p style='text-align:justify;text-indent:10.2pt; line-height:150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0'><span lang=EN
style='mso-ansi-language:EN'>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 undreamt-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 <i>life – 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<o:p></o:p></span></p>

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<span
lang=EN style='font-size:10.0pt;mso-ansi-language:EN'>Page – 97</span><span
lang=EN style='mso-ansi-language:EN'><o:p></o:p></span></p>

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<p style='text-align:justify; line-height:150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0'><span lang=EN style='mso-ansi-language:EN'>be
contested that Matter is Brahman, Tagore said with the voice of one who knows
that Spirit is Brahman.<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p style='text-align:justify;text-indent:11.6pt; line-height:150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0'><span lang=EN
style='mso-ansi-language:EN'>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 sub specie <i>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. <span style='font-weight:medium'>In</span><b>
</b>the old Indian master, it is part of his intellectual equipment, no doubt,
but nothing much more than that. <span style='font-weight:medium'>In</span><b> </b>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><o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p style='text-align:justify;text-indent:11.35pt; line-height:150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0'><span lang=EN
style='mso-ansi-language:EN'>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.<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p style='text-align:justify;text-indent:11.6pt; line-height:150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0'><span lang=EN
style='mso-ansi-language:EN'>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<o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></p>

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<span
lang=EN style='font-size:10.0pt;mso-ansi-language:EN'>Page – 98</span><span
lang=EN style='mso-ansi-language:EN'><o:p></o:p></span></p>

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<p style='text-align:justify; line-height:150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0'><span lang=EN style='mso-ansi-language:EN'>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:<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p style='text-align:justify; line-height:150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0'><span lang=EN style='mso-ansi-language:EN'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></p>

<p style='margin-left:56.15pt;text-align:justify; line-height:150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0'><span lang=EN
style='mso-ansi-language:EN'>Mine is not the deliverance achieved through mere
renunciation. Mine rather the freedom that tastes itself in a thousand
associations.</span><span lang=EN style='font-family:"Luxi Serif";mso-ansi-language:
EN'>&sup1;</span><span lang=EN style='mso-ansi-language:EN'><o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p style='text-align:justify;text-indent:13.6pt; line-height:150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0'><span lang=EN
style='mso-ansi-language:EN'>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. <span
style='font-weight:medium'>In</span><b> </b>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</span></p>
<p style='text-align:justify;text-indent:13.6pt; line-height:150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0'>&nbsp;</p>

<p style='text-align:justify;text-indent:11.6pt; line-height:150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0'><span lang=EN
style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Luxi Serif";mso-ansi-language:EN'>&sup1;</span><span
lang=EN style='font-size:10.0pt;mso-ansi-language:EN'> &quot;Deliverance is not
for me in renunciation. I feel the embrace of freedom in a thousand bonds of
delight.&quot; <i>-Gitanjali,</i></span><span lang=EN style='mso-ansi-language:
EN'><o:p></o:p></span></p>

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<span
lang=EN style='font-size:10.0pt;mso-ansi-language:EN'>Page – 99</span><span
lang=EN style='mso-ansi-language:EN'><o:p></o:p></span></p>

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<p style='text-align:justify;text-indent:-.85pt; line-height:150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0'><span lang=EN
style='mso-ansi-language:EN'>a Yogic consciousness. Still his major
perceptions, those that count, stand and are borne out by the highest spiritual
realisation.<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p style='text-align:justify;text-indent:10.75pt; line-height:150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0'><span lang=EN
style='mso-ansi-language:EN'>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 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.<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p style='text-align:justify;text-indent:10.75pt; line-height:150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0'><span lang=EN
style='mso-ansi-language:EN'>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</i>-<i>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.<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p style='text-align:justify;text-indent:11.6pt; line-height:150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0'><span lang=EN
style='mso-ansi-language:EN'>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 asp ration and endeavour to<o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></p>

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<span
lang=EN style='font-size:10.0pt;mso-ansi-language:EN'>Page – 100</span><span
lang=EN style='mso-ansi-language:EN'><o:p></o:p></span></p>

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<p style='text-align:justify; line-height:150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0'><span lang=EN style='mso-ansi-language:EN'>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 unlike 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.<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p style='text-align:justify;text-indent:11.6pt; line-height:150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0'><span lang=EN
style='mso-ansi-language:EN'>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, 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.</span><span lang=EN style='font-family:"Luxi Serif";
mso-ansi-language:EN'>&sup1;</span><span lang=EN style='mso-ansi-language:EN'><o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p style='text-align:justify; line-height:150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0'><span lang=EN style='mso-ansi-language:EN'>Thus,
on the one hand, the Eternity, the Infinity, the Spirit<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p style='text-align:justify;text-indent:8.2pt; line-height:150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0'><span lang=EN style='mso-ansi-language:
EN'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></p>

<p style='text-align:justify;text-indent:8.2pt; line-height:150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0'><span lang=EN style='font-size:
10.0pt;font-family:"Luxi Serif";mso-ansi-language:EN'>&sup1;</span><span lang=EN
style='font-size:10.0pt;mso-ansi-language:EN'> 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 because of its exquisite music and enchanting imagery:</span><span
lang=EN style='mso-ansi-language:EN'><o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p style='text-align:justify;text-indent:8.2pt; line-height:150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0'><span lang=EN style='mso-ansi-language:
EN'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></p>

<p style='margin-left:57.0pt;text-align:justify; line-height:150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0'><i><span lang=EN
style='font-size:10.0pt;mso-ansi-language:EN'>Mand</span><span lang=EN
style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Luxi Serif";mso-ansi-language:EN'>Ä</span><span
lang=EN style='font-size:10.0pt;mso-ansi-language:EN'>kin</span><span
lang=EN style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Luxi Serif";mso-ansi-language:
EN'>ī</span><span lang=EN style='font-size:10.0pt;mso-ansi-language:
EN'> nirjhar</span><span lang=EN style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:
"Luxi Serif";mso-ansi-language:EN'>Ä</span><span lang=EN
style='font-size:10.0pt;mso-ansi-language:EN'>s</span><span lang=EN
style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Luxi Serif";mso-ansi-language:EN'>ī</span><span
lang=EN style='font-size:10.0pt;mso-ansi-language:EN'>kar</span><span
lang=EN style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Luxi Serif";mso-ansi-language:
EN'>Ä</span><span lang=EN style='font-size:10.0pt;mso-ansi-language:
EN'>n</span><span lang=EN style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Luxi Serif";
mso-ansi-language:EN'>Ä</span><span lang=EN style='font-size:10.0pt;
mso-ansi-language:EN'>m vodh</span><span lang=EN style='font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:"Luxi Serif";mso-ansi-language:EN'>Ä</span><span lang=EN
style='font-size:10.0pt;mso-ansi-language:EN'> muhuh-kamPita-deva-d</span><span
lang=EN style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Luxi Serif";mso-ansi-language:
EN'>Ä</span><span lang=EN style='font-size:10.0pt;mso-ansi-language:
EN'>ruh</span></i><span lang=EN style='mso-ansi-language:EN'><o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p style='margin-left:57.0pt;text-align:justify; line-height:150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0'><span lang=EN
style='mso-ansi-language:EN'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></p>

<p style='margin-left:57.0pt;text-align:justify; line-height:150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0'><span lang=EN
style='font-size:10.0pt;mso-ansi-language:EN'>Winds carrying spray from the
falls of Mandakini, making deodars all astir.</span><span lang=EN
style='mso-ansi-language:EN'><o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p style='text-align:justify; line-height:150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0'><span lang=EN style='mso-ansi-language:EN'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></p>

<p style='text-align:justify; line-height:150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0'><span lang=EN style='font-size:10.0pt;mso-ansi-language:
EN'>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 Bergson, the great exponent of movement as reality,
in connection with certain aspects of Tagore. Indeed, Beauty in Tagore is
something moving, flowing, dancing, 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.</span><span lang=EN style='mso-ansi-language:EN'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></p>

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<span lang=EN
style='font-size:10.0pt;mso-ansi-language:EN'>Page – 101</span><span
lang=EN style='mso-ansi-language:EN'><o:p></o:p></span></p>

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<p style='text-align:justify; line-height:150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0'><span lang=EN style='mso-ansi-language:EN'>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;<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p style='text-align:justify; line-height:150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0'><span lang=EN style='mso-ansi-language:EN'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></p>

<p style='text-align:justify; line-height:150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0'><span lang=EN style='mso-ansi-language:EN'>Another
great poet of the spirit says also, almost like Tagore:<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p style='text-align:justify; line-height:150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0'><span lang=EN style='mso-ansi-language:EN'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></p>

<p style='text-align:justify; line-height:150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0'><span lang=EN style='mso-ansi-language:EN'>Cold
are the rivers of peace and their banks are leafless and lonely.</span><span
lang=EN style='font-family:"Luxi Serif";mso-ansi-language:EN'>&sup1;</span><span
lang=EN style='mso-ansi-language:EN'><o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p style='text-align:justify; line-height:150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0'><span lang=EN style='mso-ansi-language:EN'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></p>

<p style='text-align:justify; line-height:150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0'><span lang=EN style='mso-ansi-language:EN'>and
sends up this prayer:<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p style='text-align:justify; line-height:150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0'><span lang=EN style='mso-ansi-language:EN'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></p>

<p style='text-align:justify; line-height:150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0'><span lang=EN style='mso-ansi-language:EN'>Earth-souls
needing the touch of the heaven's peace to recapture,<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p style='text-align:justify; line-height:150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0'><span lang=EN style='mso-ansi-language:EN'>Heaven
needing earth's passion' to quiver its peace into rapture.<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p style='text-align:justify; line-height:150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0'><span lang=EN style='mso-ansi-language:EN'>Marry,
0 lightning eternal, the passion of a moment born fire!<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p style='text-align:justify; line-height:150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0'><span lang=EN style='mso-ansi-language:EN'>Out of
thy greatness draw close to the breast of our mortal desire!<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p style='text-align:justify; line-height:150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0'><span lang=EN style='mso-ansi-language:EN'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></p>

<p style='text-align:justify; line-height:150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0'><span lang=EN style='mso-ansi-language:EN'>This
also is Tagore's soul-prayer, his deepest aspiration. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p style='text-align:justify; line-height:150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0'><span lang=EN style='mso-ansi-language:EN'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></p>

<p style='text-align:justify; line-height:150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0'><span lang=EN style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:
"Luxi Serif";mso-ansi-language:EN'>&sup1;</span><span lang=EN style='font-size:10.0pt;
mso-ansi-language:EN'> Sri Aurobindo: &quot;Ahana&quot;, <i>Collected Poems </i>&amp;
<i>Plays, </i>Vol. 2</span><span lang=EN style='mso-ansi-language:EN'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></p>

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<span lang=EN
style='font-size:10.0pt;mso-ansi-language:EN'>Page – 102</span><span
lang=EN style='mso-ansi-language:EN'><o:p></o:p></span></p>

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