The Essential Works of Tagore. Rabindranath Tagore

music, "She who is eternally afar is beside you for ever."

      That music is silent, because I have grown to believe that my love is only near, and have forgotten that she is also far, far away.

      Music fills the infinite between two souls. This has been muffled by the mist of our daily habits.

      On shy summer nights, when the breeze brings a vast murmur out of the silence, I sit up in my bed and mourn the great loss of her who is beside me. I ask myself, "When shall I have another chance to whisper to her words with the rhythm of eternity in them?"

      Wake up, my song, from thy languor, rend this screen of the familiar, and fly to my beloved there, in the endless surprise of our first meeting!

      20

      Lovers come to you, my Queen, and proudly lay their riches at your feet: but my tribute is made up of unfulfilled hopes.

      Shadows have stolen across the heart of my world and the best in me has lost light.

      While the fortunate laugh at my penury, I ask you to lend my failings your tears, and so make them precious.

      I bring you a voiceless instrument.

      I strained to reach a note which was too high in my heart, and the string broke.

      While masters laugh at the snapped cord, I ask you to take my lute in your hands and fill its hollowness with your songs.

      21

      The father came back from the funeral rites.

      His boy of seven stood at the window, with eyes wide open and a golden amulet hanging from his neck, full of thoughts too difficult for his age.

      His father took him in his arms and the boy asked him, "Where is mother?"

      "In heaven," answered his father, pointing to the sky.

      At night the father groaned in slumber, weary with grief.

      A lamp dimly burned near the bedroom door, and a lizard chased moths on the wall.

      The boy woke up from sleep, felt with his hands the emptiness in the bed, and stole out to the open terrace.

      The boy raised his eyes to the sky and long gazed in silence. His bewildered mind sent abroad into the night the question, "Where is heaven?"

      No answer came: and the stars seemed like the burning tears of that ignorant darkness.

      22

      She went away when the night was about to wane.

      My mind tried to console me by saying, "All is vanity."

      I felt angry and said, "That unopened letter with her name on it, and this palm-leaf fan bordered with red silk by her own hands, are they not real?"

      The day passed, and my friend came and said to me, "Whatever is good is true, and can never perish."

      "How do you know?" I asked impatiently; "was not this body good which is now lost to the world?"

      As a fretful child hurting its own mother, I tried to wreck all the shelters that ever I had, in and about me, and cried, "This world is treacherous."

      Suddenly I felt a voice saying—"Ungrateful!"

      I looked out of the window, and a reproach seemed to come from the star-sprinkled night,—"You pour out into the void of my absence your faith in the truth that I came!"

      23

      The river is grey and the air dazed with blown sand.

      On a morning of dark disquiet, when the birds are mute and their nests shake in the gust, I sit alone and ask myself, "Where is she?"

      The days have flown wherein we sat too near each other; we laughed and jested, and the awe of love's majesty found no words at our meetings.

      I made myself small, and she trifled away every moment with pelting talk.

      To-day I wish in vain that she were by me, in the gloom of the coming storm, to sit in the soul's solitude.

      24

      The name she called me by, like a flourishing jasmine, covered the whole seventeen years of our love. With its sound mingled the quiver of the light through the leaves, the scent of the grass in the rainy night, and the sad silence of the last hour of many an idle day.

      Not the work of God alone was he who answered to that name; she created him again for herself during those seventeen swift years.

      Other years were to follow, but their vagrant days, no longer gathered within the fold of that name uttered in her voice, stray and are scattered.

      They ask me, "Who should fold us?"

      I find no answer and sit silent, and they cry to me while dispersing, "We seek a shepherdess!"

      Whom should they seek?

      That they do not know. And like derelict evening clouds they drift in the trackless dark, and are lost and forgotten.

      25

      I feel that your brief days of love have not been left behind in those scanty years of your life.

      I seek to know in what place, away from the slow-thieving dust, you keep them now. I find in my solitude some song of your evening that died, yet left a deathless echo; and the sighs of your unsatisfied hours I find nestled in the warm quiet of the autumn noon.

      Your desires come from the hive of the past to haunt my heart, and I sit still to listen to their wings.

      26

      You have taken a bath in the dark sea. You are once again veiled in a bride's robe, and through death's arch you come back to repeat our wedding in the soul.

      Neither lute nor drum is struck, no crowd has gathered, not a wreath is hung on the gate.

      Your unuttered words meet mine in a ritual unillumined by lamps.

      27

      I was walking along a path overgrown with grass, when suddenly I heard from some one behind, "See if you know me?"

      I turned round and looked at her and said, "I cannot remember your name."

      She said, "I am that first great Sorrow whom you met when you were young."

      Her eyes looked like a morning whose dew is still in the air.

      I stood silent for some time till I said, "Have you lost all the great burden of your tears?"

      She smiled and said nothing. I felt that her tears had had time to learn the language of smiles.

      "Once you said," she whispered, "that you would cherish your grief for ever."

      I blushed and said, "Yes, but years have passed and I forget."

      Then I took her hand in mine and said, "But you have changed."

      "What was sorrow once has now become peace," she said.

      28

      Our life sails on the uncrossed sea whose waves chase each other in an eternal hide-and-seek.

      It is the restless sea of change, feeding its foaming flocks to lose them over and over again, beating its hands against the calm of the sky.

      Love, in the centre of this circling war-dance of light and dark, yours is that green island, where the sun kisses the shy forest shade and silence is wooed by birds' singing.

AMA AND VINAYAKA

       Table of Contents

      Night on the battlefield: AMA meets her father VINAYAKA.

      AMA. Father!

      VINAYAKA.