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    The Gardener
    The Gardener
    The Gardener
    Ebook69 pages50 minutes

    The Gardener

    By Rabindranath Tagore

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    About this ebook

    The Gardner is a collection of the most beautiful love poems by Rabindranath Tagore, a Bengali poet, writer, playwright, composer, philosopher, social reformer, and painter. The central theme of these poems, set in the Bengali countryside, is love and life.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherGood Press
    Release dateNov 21, 2019
    ISBN4057664647054
    The Gardener
    Author

    Rabindranath Tagore

    Rabindranath Tagore was born in May 1861. He was a Bengali poet, Brahmo Samaj philosopher, visual artist, playwright, novelist, and composer whose works reshaped Bengali literature and music in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. He became Asia's first Nobel laureate when he won the 1913 Nobel Prize in Literature. His works included numerous novels, short-stories, collection of songs, dance-drama, political and personal essays. Some prominent examples are Gitanjali (Song Offerings) , Gora (Fair-Faced), and Ghare-Baire (The Home and the World). He died on 7th August 1941.

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      Book preview

      The Gardener - Rabindranath Tagore

      Rabindranath Tagore

      The Gardener

      Published by Good Press, 2022

      goodpress@okpublishing.info

      EAN 4057664647054

      Table of Contents

      Cover

      Titlepage

      Text

      Preface

      Table of Contents

      Most of the lyrics of love and life, the translations of which from Bengali are published in this book, were written much earlier than the series of religious poems contained in the book named Gitanjali. The translations are not always literal—the originals being sometimes abridged and sometimes paraphrased.

      Rabindranath Tagore.

      1

      SERVANT. Have mercy upon your servant, my queen!

      QUEEN. The assembly is over and my servants are all gone. Why

      do you come at this late hour?

      SERVANT. When you have finished with others, that is my time.

      I come to ask what remains for your last servant to do.

      QUEEN. What can you expect when it is too late?

      SERVANT. Make me the gardener of your flower garden.

      QUEEN. What folly is this?

      SERVANT. I will give up my other work.

      I will throw my swords and lances down in the dust. Do not send

      me to distant courts; do not bid me undertake new conquests.

      But make me the gardener of your flower garden.

      QUEEN. What will your duties be?

      SERVANT. The service of your idle days.

      I will keep fresh the grassy path where you walk in the morning,

      where your feet will be greeted with praise at every step by

      the flowers eager for death.

      I will swing you in a swing among the branches of the

      saptaparna, where the early evening moon will struggle

      to kiss your skirt through the leaves.

      I will replenish with scented oil the lamp that burns by your

      bedside, and decorate your footstool with sandal and saffron

      paste in wondrous designs.

      QUEEN. What will you have for your reward?

      SERVANT. To be allowed to hold your little fists like tender

      lotus-buds and slip flower chains over your wrists; to tinge

      the soles of your feet with the red juice of ashoka petals and kiss away the speck of dust that may chance to

      linger there.

      QUEEN. Your prayers are granted, my servant, you will be the

      gardener of my flower garden.

      2

      "Ah, poet, the evening draws near; your hair is turning grey.

      Do you in your lonely musing hear the message of the hereafter?

      It is evening, the poet said, "and I am listening because some

      one may call from the village, late though it be.

      "I watch if young straying hearts meet together, and two pairs of

      eager eyes beg for music to break their silence and speak for

      them.

      "Who is there to weave their passionate songs, if I sit on the

      shore of life and contemplate death and the beyond?

      "The early evening star disappears.

      "The glow of a funeral pyre slowly dies by the silent river.

      "Jackals cry in chorus from the courtyard of the deserted house

      in the light of the worn-out moon.

      "If some wanderer, leaving home, come here to watch the night and

      with bowed head listen to the murmur of the darkness, who is

      there to whisper the secrets of life into his ears if I,

      shutting my doors, should try to free myself from mortal bonds?

      "It is a trifle that my hair is turning grey.

      "I am ever as young or as old as the youngest and the oldest of

      this village.

      "Some have smiles, sweet and simple, and some a sly twinkle in

      their eyes.

      "Some have tears that well up in the daylight, and others tears

      that are hidden in the gloom.

      They all have need for me, and I have no time to brood over the

      afterlife.

      I am of an age with each, what matter if my hair turns grey?

      3

      In the morning I cast my net into the sea.

      I dragged up from the dark abyss things of strange aspect and

      strange beauty—some shone like a smile, some glistened like

      tears, and some were flushed like the cheeks of a bride.

      When with the day's burden I went home, my

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