Complete Works. Rabindranath Tagore

"Yes," she answers,

       "And also only for that nameless flower."

      The sky remains infinitely vacant

       for earth there to build its heaven with dreams.

      Perhaps the crescent moon smiles in doubt

       at being told that it is a fragment

       awaiting perfection.

      Let the evening forgive the mistakes of the day

       and thus win peace for herself.

      Beauty smiles in the confinement of the bud,

       in the heart of a sweet incompleteness.

      Your flitting love lightly brushed with its wings

       my sun-flower

       and never asked if it was ready to surrender its honey.

      Leaves are silences

       around flowers which are their words.

      The tree bears its thousand years

       as one large majestic moment.

      My offerings are not for the temple at the end of the road,

       but for the wayside shrines

       that surprise me at every bend.

      Your smile, my love, like the smell of a strange flower,

       is simple and inexplicable.

      Death laughs when the merit of the dead is exaggerated

       for it swells his store with more than he can claim.

      The sigh of the shore follows in vain

       the breeze that hastens the ship across the sea.

      Truth loves its limits,

       for there it meets the beautiful.

      Between the shores of Me and Thee

       there is the loud ocean, my own surging self,

       which I long to cross.

      The right to possess boasts foolishly

       of its right to enjoy.

      The rose is a great deal more

       than a blushing apology for the thorn.

      Day offers to the silence of stars

       his golden lute to be tuned

       for the endless life.

      The wise know how to teach,

       the fool how to smite.

      The centre is still and silent in the heart

       of an eternal dance of circles.

      The judge thinks that he is just when he compares

       The oil of another's lamp

       with the light of his own.

      The captive flower in the King's wreath

       smiles bitterly when the meadow-flower envies her.

      Its store of snow is the hill's own burden,

       its outpouring if streams is borne by all the world.

      Listen to the prayer of the forest

       for its freedom in flowers.

      Let your love see me

       even through the barrier of nearness.

      The spirit of work in creation is there

       to carry and help the spirit of play.

      To carry the burden of the instrument,

       count the cost of its material,

       and never to know that it is for music,

       is the tragedy of deaf life.

      Faith is the bird that feels the light

       and sings when the dawn is still dark.

      I bring to thee, night, my day's empty cup,

       to be cleansed with thy cool darkness

       for a new morning's festival.

      The mountain fir, in its rustling,

       modulates the memory of its fights with the storm

       into a hymn of peace.

      God honoured me with his fight

       when I was rebellious,

       He ignored me when I was languid.

      The sectarian thinks

       that he has the sea

       ladled into his private pond.

      In the shady depth of life

       are the lonely nests of memories

       that shrink from words.

      Let my love find its strength

       in the service of day,

       its peace in the union of night.

      Life sends up in blades of grass

       its silent hymn of praise

       to the unnamed Light.

      The stars of night are to me

       the memorials of my day's faded flowers.

      Open thy door to that which must go,

       for the loss becomes unseemly when obstructed.

      True end is not in the reaching of the limit,

       but in a completion which is limitless.

      The shore whispers to the sea:

       "Write to me what thy waves struggle to say."

       The sea writes in foam again and again

       and wipes off the lines in a boisterous despair.

      Let the touch of thy finger thrill my life's strings

       and make the music thine and mine.

      The inner world rounded in my life like a fruit,

       matured in joy and sorrow,

       will drop into the darkness of the original soil

       for some further course of creation.

      Form is in Matter, rhythm in Force,

       meaning in the Person.

      There are seekers of wisdom and seekers of wealth,

       I seek thy company so that I may sing.

      As the tree its leaves, I shed my words on the earth,

       let my thoughts unuttered flower in thy silence.

      My faith in truth, my vision of the perfect,

       help thee, Master, in thy creation.

      All the delights that I have felt

       in life's fruits and flowers

       let me offer to thee at the end of the feast,

       in a perfect union of love.

      Some have thought deeply and explored the

       meaning of thy truth,

       and they are great;

       I have listened to catch the music of thy play,

       and I am glad.

      The tree is a winged spirit

       released from the bondage of seed,

       pursuing its adventure of life

       across the unknown.

      The lotus offers its beauty to the heaven,

       the grass its service to the earth.

      The sun's kiss mellows into abandonment

       the miserliness of the green fruit clinging to its stem.

      The