O Poet! Words upon words you pile,
Day and night, now stop awhile
To ponder – as you heighten your verbiage
Towering without bondage –
In endless structural craze
Non-stop its audacity all to amaze.
Oblivious you are of halt’s finality
That there is your art’s liberty;
That only in the temple of speech
Will take seat the non-vocal deity
The final message in heavenly tranquility
Will dawn as you beseech.
Keep room for silence enormous
As your store you amass
To build your inane Himalayan tower
A blockade to heaven’s nectarous shower.
To heaping insanity if you will stick,
The yield is a burden without frolic.
When due, if it declines to pause
Building nests ceaseless will be the cause
To cripple the might
Of the bird’s wings for his final flight.
So stop;
As the dusk does fall
In the shade less luminous hall
For day’s verbosity
Signaling peace of eternity;
Arrives the time for utter drain out
For night’s deepest joy after long bout.
Your lute with hundred string
Dance of delight it brings
In ceaseless stir –
Let behind the curtain it pass far
There for the solitude
With music absolute.
Streams of utter emotion
Be lost in un-divulged ocean.
Original: Poem no: 18 of the book ‘Patraput’ by Rabindranath Tagore written in 1937.
Translator’s note:
Tagore left for us a ocean of literature in which the highest aesthetic qualities and deepest philosophical/spiritual/emotional perceptions run through. His songs, possibly more endowed with such qualities numbering about 2500, though only a small fraction of his vast work, is unparallel-ed in the history of literature and music. Like me, who are not voracious readers, neither have time for such hobby amidst their daily chores, or so they think, can at best pick up pebbles at the shore of this ocean. Yet, that alone can exalt them to a great height of these perceptions where volumes of other leading literatures fail. To audience a Rabindrasangeet (Tagore’s song) and/or his poem at once makes us conscious about our awful limitations in these top level faculties while gaining a momentary passage to these during their recitals. One may appreciate the claim that only Tagore could pen the above poem of all the scribes in the literary history.
