On The Nature of Love: Poetry by Rabindranath Tagore

On The Nature of Love: Rabindranath Tagore was born in 1861 in the vast city of Calcutta. His Brahman family was wealthy and prominent; his father, Maharshi Debendranath Tagore, was a scholar and religious reformer. Sarada Devi, his mother, died when he was just a young boy — when her body was carried out through the courtyard and then burned, was when he first realized that his mother would never return. His family were pioneers within the Bengal Renaissance, making great efforts to combine their traditional culture from India with those of the Western.

Tagore, the youngest of his family, began composing poetry at the young age of eight. His earliest education was provided by tutors, followed then by a variety of schools including one year at a college in London. By 1883, he had married and had three daughters and two sons, all from his only wife, Mrinalini Devi Raichaudhuri.

Tagore wrote his first collection of poems at the age of 17, and it was published by one of his friends as a surprise gift. He later collected a large selection of folklore and local legends from the area now known as Bangladesh. Then, in between 1893 and the beginning of the 1890s, he published a total of seven volumes of poetry. Among these were The Golden Boat (Sonar Tari) and the well known Khanika. This was probably one of the most productive writing segments in his life, and it resulted in an inaptly applied epitaph, The Bengali Shelley”. Probably one of the most valuable things regarding Tagore’s writings is that he wrote in the more common dialects of the local people, refusing to write in the traditional language of India. Although this was very popular among the common people, the scholars and critics who reviewed his work found it less acceptable.

On The Nature of Love: Poetry by Tagore

The night is black and the forest has no end;
a million people thread it in a million ways.
We have trysts to keep in the darkness,
but where or with whom- of that we are unaware.
But we have this faith- that a lifetime’s bliss
will appear any minute, with a smile upon its lips.
Scents, touches, sounds, snatches of songs brush us,
pass us, give us delightful shocks.
Then peradventure there’s a flash of lightning:
whomever I see that instant I fall in love with.
I call that person and cry:
‘This life is blest! For your sake such miles have I traversed!’
All those others who come close and
moved off in the darkness – I don’t know if they exist or not.

∼ ‘On The Nature of Love‘ poetry by Rabindranath Tagore

He developed a trusted reputation as a poet and author in both England and the United States upon the international publication of Song Offerings (Gitanjali). In this work, Tagore attempted to identify the sources of inner calmness while exploring a series of themes devoted to human and divine love. Tagore translated the poems from this collection into English. These writings appeared in print in 1912 and included an introduction by the infamous William Butler Yates. His writings attracted the attention of the committee of the Nobel Prize awards, which was probably one of the highlights of his life. As if he had not accomplished enough in his life, at the age of seventy, Tagore decided that he was going to take up oil painting, at which he was decidedly successful.