Dec 25, 2024
Dec 25, 2024
Excerpts from Tagore’s Letters & Diaries.
Letter to Ramendrasundar Tribedi,
from Selaidah (Bangladesh); 29 February 1912
My heart holds the perception of the life of a tree, which I can confess because I have been a human. But why the tree alone, perception of the entire inanimate world is imbibed there too. All the vibrations of the Universe pass me the thrill of camaraderie – within my heart, the Anandam (heavenly joy) of the trees and plants mute over ages has found expression- else, when to-day the mango buds are wild on the trees, on whose invitation do I go forward to organize the spring festival! There is an enormous Anandam in me which is within the land, water, trees, birds and beasts here also.
When I have seen through the open window of my boat the sunrays falling on the saffron soil of this ancient earth, my entire body stretches to the remote border of its dust and green there. When at some holy moments my feel is deep that I am integral with all the soil, rock, water and all here, my body and soul delight up in a clear music of an all pervasive existence. This is my nature and not a mere fancy, from which founts my poems, songs and stories. This does not inhibit me. A man I am and so I am everything – which is my glory – in my senses the world’s history illuminate, there culminate the existences of all animate and inanimate. That is why the waves of my blood rhyme with the sea’s, but the sea waves don’t know me so, my euphoria delights up combined with the trees’ but they don’t know me; I am not within their subconscious.
Originally published in the Bulletin (May 2010) of the Ramakrishna Mission Institute of Culture.
Translation by the author.
References and Source
The January-June 2003 issue of “Shrayan” a compilation from Tagore’s letters and diaries. by the editor of the magazine Mr. Pathik Basu.
21 April 2012 TO: Ms. Arundhati Sarkar Not being a student of literaturer, I never had the scope to grasp Wordsworth (or any other poet for that matter, including Tagore) thgoroughly. Yet, I have the impertinence of comparing the English poets with Tagore. About Wordsworth, I can't hold him in high esteem so far as his perception of Death is concerned which we get in his poem on Lucy, while on Lucy's death he perceives her going round the Sun along with the Earth's motions. It seems, Wordswoth's perception of Death never went deeper than Lucy's grave, while Tagore's obliterates the boundary between Life and Death and visualises perennial Anandam in Creation's process. You may find my translations of Tagore's poems on Death Boloji.com, Muse India and my book 'The Eclipsed Sun' whose link to its Internet edition Boloji.com gives in my personal profile. Yours sincerely, Rajat Das Gupta |
it reminds me of Wordsworth's referring to an experience of being so much at one with Nature around him on his way to school that he had to touch a brick of a house to restore him to his physical self. He refers to this experience in the Immortality Ode as "fallings " and "vanishings" by which he meant that these experiences were bygones when he became an adult. |