Letters from a Young Poet - Rabindranath Tagore

Rabindranath Tagore's letters.

Some excerpt to share the writing, and the warmth and tranquility in it. 

It is a slow read for me. Still in the early half of the book. Sometimes a few pages are enough to lend some good sunshine to the day. 

The book by Rosinka Chaudhri is a collection of letters which Tagore wrote to his niece. So many of these has been written from a boat on which he spent part of his time living and writing. They carry the lapping rythm of soft waters.

One sees such a large, beautiful, careless and generous peace in this idle, drowsy, peaceful, aimless world of nature and, in comparison, one can see such a persistently trying, belaboured, harassed, minute and constant disquiet within one’s self that, gazing at the shadowy blue line of the trees on the distant shore, one becomes quite inattentive.

I was sitting and thinking, why are our country’s fields, riverbanks, sky and sun bathed in such a deep melancholy? The reason might be that in our country, it is nature one notices the most—skies free of clouds, fields without any end, the sun beating down—in the midst of this man seems very insignificant—men come and go like the ferry boat from this side to that, one hears their faint, indistinct murmur, one sees their little bit of coming and going in life’s marketplace in the hope of small joys and sorrows—but how small, how brief, how utterly futile those indistinct murmurs, the snatches of song, that constant activity and work seem in this vast, expansive,

the evening as it falls on this river, these fields, this village, is so incredible, so vast, so peaceful, so immeasurable that it can only be felt silently; the moment you try to express it, you become restless.

…. I feel like writing on—but of nothing else, this sound of water, this sunny day, this bank of sand. It seems I’ll have to come back to writing of these same things to you every day—because when I get intoxicated I keep going on about the same thing…

Inwardly, I feel like laughing when I think of my own endless solemnity and deeply intelligent appearance—the whole thing feels like a farce.Within myself I too am just like them, a poor man, affected by joy and sorrow; I too have so many small demands from the world, so manyheartfelt tears for the smallest of reasons, so dependent in my life upon the grace of so many people!

so peaceful, so beautiful, so secluded—the river distributing affection and beauty on both sides as it goes winding along

an unknown, unseen river of our Bengal. Full of only love and softness and sweetness. No restlessness, yet it has no rest.

Motion, by itself, has an attraction of its own

It’s like sitting on a chair and absent-mindedly swinging one’s legs; on the whole the body is at rest, yet its extra energy, which never wants to sit still for a moment, has been given some monotonous work and kept unmindful….

The solitude and silence of the afternoons here are not to be found anywhere else.

inner lament of the entire vast world, not someone’s domestic story.

the limitless melancholy of this vast world.

One could imagine that mother earth lives with her own children and clamour and household work in the midst of society—but where there’s a little space, a little silence, a little bit of open sky, that’s where her vast heart’s hidden sadness and melancholy can appear; there, one can hear her deepest sigh.

 

The days over here keep lying there, sunning themselves in this way for twelve hours, and in the remaining twelve hours they wrap themselves up in the deepest darkness and go silently to sleep.

We too are flowing every day through many apprehensions, we cannot see our end, but He who has given us, in this limitless life, the tremendous force called our propensity, He alone knows how to use that force to direct us.

Man’s mind is a thing that functions in so many diverse ways—it moves in so many directions—and it has so many claims, that it must lean in one direction or the other. That is its life’s aim, its sign of humanity, its protest against inertia.

When one is living in Calcutta one forgets how astonishingly beautiful this world is. It is only when you live here that you comprehend that this sun that sets every day among these peaceful trees by the side of this little river, and the hundred thousand stars that silently rise every night above this endless, ashen, lonely, silent sandbank—what a surprisingly noble event this is. The sun, as it rises slowly in the east at dawn, opens a page in some tremendous book, and the evening gradually turns another enormous page in the sky from the west—what an amazing script that too is—and this barely flowing river and this sandbank spread across the horizon and the other shore like a picture—this neglected bit at the edge of the world—what sort of large, silent, deserted school is this!

I want writing that is quite simple, beautiful, sweet and generous

All Excerpts From

Chaudhuri, Rosinka. “Letters from a Young Poet.” 

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