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Summary: Soul offerings through verse
Review: I have heard it said that reading Tagore in translation is like looking at a beautiful piece of embroidery from the wrong side of the cloth. But those who do not know Bengali must rely on translations, and in the case of "Gitanjali", Tagore himself has translated his verses into English. This is poetry that evokes all the feelings that make us human, such as love, devotion, faith and aspirations for that which is noble. The lines have to be absorbed, reflected upon, and at the end, we become all the better for it. One can only wonder how much more touching the verses must sound in Bengali.
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Summary: ssghere is clearly mistaken
Review: I strongly disagree with the close-minded views of ssghere from Berkeley California. He says first of all that the poems are written in free verse and they are not...they are in prose. Furthermore, Tagore does not make Any comments about Hinduism,...in fact, all of his poems are from a very separate SECT of hinduism called Bramhon, which believes in One God. His style and message is beautiful, and I reccomend that ssghere go to the library and do some research to get his current knowledge checked before he writes more reviews.
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Summary: ssghere is clearly mistaken
Review: I strongly disagree with the close-minded views of ssghere from Berkeley California. He says first of all that the poems are written in free verse and they are not...they are in prose. Furthermore, Tagore does not make Any comments about Hinduism,...in fact, all of his poems are from a very separate SECT of hinduism called Bramhon, which believes in One God. His style and message is beautiful, and I reccomend that ssghere go to the library and do some research to get his current knowledge checked before he writes more reviews.
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Summary: Tagore: Philosopher-Poet
Review: Rabindranath Tagore has provided Western culture with a strong example of Eastern Philosophy in both prose and poetry. Tagore had written his Gitanjali (song offerings) in Bengali, and after he learned from William Rothenstein of Western interest in them, he translated them into English. Chiefly for this volume, Tagore was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913, the same year that Macmillan brought out a hard-cover copy of his prose translations of Gitanjali.
W. B. Yeats, in the introduction to Tagore's Gitanjali, writes that this volume has "stirred my blood as nothing has for years . . . ." He explains, "These lyrics . . . display in their thought a world I have dreamed of all my life long." Then Yeats describes the Indian culture that he feels is responsible for producing this remarkable work: "The work of a supreme culture, they yet appear as much the growth of the common soil as the grass and the rushes. A tradition, where poetry and religion are the same thing, has passed through the centuries, gathering from learned and unlearned metaphor and emotion, and carried back again to the multitude the thought of the scholar and of the noble."
He contrasts the art of his own culture: "If our life was not a continual warfare, we would not have taste, we would not know what is good, we would not find hearers and readers. Four-fifths of our energy is spent in this quarrel with bad taste, whether in our own minds or in the minds of others."
Yeats might seem harsh in his assessment of his own culture's motivation to art, but, no doubt, he has correctly identified the mood of his era. Yeats having been born of Western culture, his birth dates are famous as the markers of two horrendous Western wars 1865 and 1939. So his rough estimate of the artists being motivated by warfare is quite understandable.
On the other hand, his assessment of Tagore's achievement is accurate. As Yeats tells us, Tagore's songs are not only respected and admired by the scholarly class, but also they are sung in the fields by peasants. Yeats would never have expected his own poetry to be accept by such a wide spectrum of the population.
My favorite Gitanjali poem (song offering) is #7:
"My song has put off her adornments. She has no pride of dress and decoration. Ornaments would mar our union. They would come between thee and me. Their jingling would drown thy whispers. My poet's vanity dies in shame before thy sight. O Master Poet, I have sat down at thy feet. Only let me make my life simple and straight llike a flute of reed for thee to fill with music."
This poem shows the charm of humbleness: it is a prayer to help the poet open his heart to the Divine Beloved without extraneous words or gestures. A vain poet would produce vain poetry, so this poet wants to be open to the simple humility of truth that only the Divine Beloved can afford him. As Yeats says, these songs grow out of culture in which art and religion are the same, so it is not surprising that we find our offerer of songs speaking to God in song after song, as is the case in #7. And the last line in song #7 is a subtle--or perhaps not so subtle--allusion to Bhagavan Krishna. According the Paramahansa Yogananda, "Krishna is shown in Hindu art with a flute; on it he plays the enrapturing song that recalls to their true home the human souls wandering in delusion."
Rabindranath Tagore, in addition to being an accomplished poet, essayist, playwright, and novelist, is also remembered as an educator, who founded Visva Bharati University in Santiniketan, West Bengal. Tagore is then an excellent example of a Renaissance man, one skilled in many fields of endeavor. We can be grateful that one of those fields is philosophical poetry.
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Summary: Simple, meaningful poems.
Review: Recommended reading for anyone who wants to understand Indian culture. In 1913, Tagore became the first non-European and Asian to achieve the honour of receiving the Nobel Prize in Literature. Can you imagine the honour he and the people of his generation living in that part of the world must have felt? Simple but meaningful, each of his poems carries a deeper meaning. Few may realise but he composed Jana Gana Mana, which was later to become India's National Anthem!
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Summary: Beautiful verse. A must read.
Review: Soothing thoughts for restless times
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Summary: Cross-cultural understanding
Review: Tagore is a wonderful example of merging of cultures - for example one of the prose poems is the reflections of the Samaritan women at the well after her encounter with Jesus. Yet other poems reveal the eroticism of longing that one associates with Indian bhakti poets such as Mirabai; others seem to long for a God without form as one associates with Kabir. Tagore thus represents the acceptance of some things Western while retaining a distinctively South Asian bent. The poems themselves are excellent and wide ranging - a few are not specifically religious or spiritual. An excellent book to read to enjoy either the Nobel prize winner Tagore or as an introduction to bhakti (devotional) poetry as a whole.
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Summary: A treat to the spirit
Review: The word and the deed were never far from each other in Tagore's life and not surprisingly he advocated the Universal Man. He was a polymath: a poet, fiction writer, dramatist, painter, educator, political thinker, philosopher of science. He was also a genius in music, choreography, architecture, social service and statesmanship. Over six decades Tagore gave the world some 2,500 songs, more than 2,000 paintings and drawings, 28 volumes of poetry, drama, opera, short stories, novels, essays and diaries and a vast number of letters. I would enthusiatically recommend this book by my favorite author. Like the Psalms of David, Gitanjali is a soothing balm to the spirit. I read this entire book in less than two hours and has been my long-trip travel companion ever since. The introduction to the book by W. B. Yeats is magical and all the poems in this book transcend your imagination. The variety and quality of the poems are unbelievable!
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Summary: The Tenderest Poems I Have Ever REad
Review: These are among the most tender and inspiring poems that I have ever read. Each line is full of wonder and joy at everything the poet sees. They are impossible to describe. This tiny book should be read by everyone who has the slightest interest in verse.
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Summary: Poems about Life
Review: These are the poems that won Tagore the Nobel Prize for literature. They are poems with simple themes, revolving around our day to day actions, our everyday thoughts, the rainbow of emotions that every human has the capacity to feel. And with all these he connects us to God, and the poems entwine man and God with its simplicity and truth. Gitanjali = (Geet)+(Anjali) - an offering of songs to the Almighty.
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