Rabindranath Tagore is a lyric poet par excellence. Both in quality and quantity his lyrics are better than those of English lyricists and Indian bards. He fuses both the English and Indian traditions of poetry. Taking his birth from Kalidas and sustenance from Jaidev and the Indian Vaishnav poets, he also sucks the nectar of Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats and Swinburne.
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| Lyricism in Tagore’s Poetry |
His concernments with Soul and God, with Life and Death, his sublimity, his feeling of gopibhav and Madhavbhav, are some of the distinct qualities not found in the lyrics of the English poets and song - writers from Wyatt and Surrey to Swinburne and Eliot. Even Hopkins could not catch the melodies and grandeur of Tagore despite his religious concerns. His poems are geets, comparable to Urdu gazals. The moment one reads Tagore's lyrics, one feels elevated. Longinus’ dictum and definition of the ‘sublime’ fully applies to Tagore and Arnold's definition of grand style will have no better application than on Tagore. His is, indeed a, noble soul, nobly adored and grandly ready, to give up all the dross and dust of lowliness and triviality. In the second song of his Gitanjali, Tagore prays:
"All that is harsh and dissonant in my life melts into one
sweet harmony— and my adoration spreads wings
like a glad bird on its flight across the sea
I know thou takes pleasure in my singing
I know that only as a singer I come before thy presence
Drunk with the joy of singing I forget myself and call
thee friend who art my lord."
In Tagore, says Prof. Budhadev Bose, “you will find no inter play of contrast, no lightening strokes of discord — no sick roses, no pearls made of dead man's eyes, no garlic and sapphires in the mud, no gong - tormented mess. In building his sunny pleasure - dome, he can dispense with the caves of ice and the prophecies of war. He is all felicity, all melodiousness and be ensnared by flowers. He can make you swoon with delight, but he never lacerates.”
An Indian teacher, Prof. S.Z.H. Abidi, while comparing Tagore with other Indian poets who have written in English, says:
The major voices in older Indo - Anglian poetry are lyrical. Toru displays an exquisite lyric talent in her shorter poems though she had no time to be an Indian Sappho. Manmohan Ghose is another lyric poet but he was not satisfied with his mere lyric gifts. A. Ghose had a lyrical gift of a high order though he less frequently used it. The popular appellation of Sarojini as the Nightingale of India leaves one in no doubt regarding the nature of her Muse but her poetry is at times too sing - song. Similarly her brother Harin has lyrical gift of a rare order but he too is uneven. Only Tagore can be singled out as one who remains a supremely lyric dowel poet from first to last.
In fact, singing of India's rich things, “Aurobindo and Tagore, the savants of Pondicherry and Shantiniketan, took on the role of Poet seer - philosopher, and thus made themselves distinct lyric poets. Consequently in Tagore you may miss the twang of the contemporary idiom. The world he takes you through has the atmosphere of either an agricultural society or of India's classical epoch: the flute, the lotus the rich grain, the cowherd boy, the footpath winding though the plains, the Bunyan, the earthen lamp, the palace, the chariot, the king of these and their like his poems are so full that you can read a thousand lines without realising that the poet had lived a good part of his life in modern cities.”
Tagore's output as a lyric poet is large. He has written about 2,000 lyrics, and has rejected the epic tradition. “He wrote probably the largest number of lyrics ever attempted by any poet. His English poetical works — The Gitanjali, The Garden, The Lovers Gifts, The Fugitive and Other Poems, The Crescent Moon, etc. are all collections of lyrics.”
Gitanjali is a collection of devotional lyrics. It is a rosary of prayers offered to God, a Lotus the petals of which close within themselves both the poet and the reader. Here “Tagore is in direct line with those bards who have sung of the Spirit, who always soared high above the falsehoods and ugliness of a merely mundane life and lived in the undecaying delights and beauties of a diviner consciousness.” In the words of A.N. Dwivedi, “In it Tagore seeks a perfect order of human existence. The nature of life: the mystical joy, the sense of inadequacy as a mystic, a desire for death, the devout dedication to God, a dislike for material allurements, the befriending of the companionless people on earth, the wailing of the heart of the poet: these are all found in Gitanjali.”
The Gardener (1913), dedicated to W.B. Yeats, contains “most of the lyrics of love and life.” It is “the main feast of love poetry.” The little girl’s love for the Prince who passes by her door goes uncared for. She puts on her best and yet
I swept aside the veil from my face, I tore the ruby chain from my neck and flung it in his path.
Why do you look at me amazed, mother?
I know well he did not pick up my chain, I know it was crushed under his wheels leaving a red stain upon the dust, and no one knows what my gift was nor to whom.
The Crescent Moon (1913) is a lyric collection for children. It is half Wordsworthian and half Blake like. In Lover's Gift and Crossing (1918), there are 60 lyrics in the first part and 78 in the second. These lyrics too deal with love, earthly as well as divine. In Crossing, the poet receiving a call from God prays:
Deliver me from own shadows, my lord, from the wrecks and confusion of my days.
For the night is dark and thy pilgrim is blinded,
Hold thou my hand.
Deliver me from despair.
and
Thou hast given me thy love, filling the world with thy gifts.
They are showered upon me when I do not know them,
for my heart is asleep and dark in the night.
and furthermore
Love's play is stilled into worship, life's stream touches
the deep, and the world of forms comes to its nest
in the beauty beyond all forms.
The next volume of Tagore's lyrics that needs attention is The Fugitive and Other Poems. In it appears Urvashi about which Prof. Iyengar has said, “Had Tagore written this wonderful poem, alone .......... and no other, he should still be counted among the world's great magicians of song.” Beyond praise is the melody of the splendid, swaying lines knit into their superb stanzas, or the flashing felicity of diction in such line as the following (translated by Edward Thompson):
Woman you are, to ravish the soul of paradise..........
Like the dawn you are without veil. Urvashi.
And without shame.
Tagore views Urvashi as a super woman - not child, nor mother, nor wife but the beautiful woman who is goddess and seductress at once. She carries nectar in one hand, and poison in the other; she slumbered till day came, and then appeared in her ‘awful little of bloom’; she is of all men adored, the ageless wonder:
In the assembly of Gods, when thou dancest in ecstasy of joy,
O Swaying wave, Urvashi,
The companies of billows in mild - ocean swell and dance, bent on bent,
In the crest of the corn the skirts of the earth tremble;
From thy necklace stars fall off in the sky;
Suddenly in the breast of man the heart forgets itself.
The blood dances!
Tagore's lyrics offer us a large variety of moods and subject matter. For the convenience of study they can be divided into: (1) devotional or religious lyrical (2) Patriotic lyrics; (3) love lyrics; nature lyrics and (5) humanistic lyrics. However, it is mainly as a writer of devotional and love and nature lyrics that Tagore would be remembered most.
Tagore's nature lyrics rank with the greatest nature - poetry of the world. He is a great river - poet and a great poet of the Bengali seasons and landscape. The forms, colours, sounds and scenes of nature fascinate him and he communicates his own joy in the manifold beauties of nature to his reader. Flowers bloom at every step in his poetry, and rivers flow with their sweet music. He observes accurately and describes minutely and precisely. Vivid and colourful word pictures of nature's beauty are scattered all up and down his lyrics. His love of nature is all - comprehensive and realistic; like Wordsworth he is not unaware of Nature, red in “tooth and claw.” He is a poet both of the pleasanter and softer in nature, as well as of Nature in its more harsh, unpleasant and ugly moods.
Nature is fully ransacked by Tagore as a treasury of rich images. The mental pictures which his lyrics invoke are those of the orchards and landscapes, birds and animals, seasons and the great elemental power such as the sun, the moon, the ocean, the sky the cloud etc. The meadows with green grass, different kinds of flowers, trees, streams, and rivers amidst them, the boat, the pilgrim and the voyage are all there again and again. His are “songs constructing out of themselves their own wondrous world in which dawns and eves and languorous moons, vagrant tints of the skies and glorious horizons, flowers and birds, beggar – maids, pilgrims and messengers with tidings - man and nature - jostle with one another and unite at a point in the inner heart of the poet and raise there paeans of love and longing for the ever – far, and yet the ever - near Master of the whole.”
Tagore's lyrics are remarkable for all the general qualities found in the lyrics of other major lyrical poets of the world subjectivity, economy of expression, intensity of emotion, etc. He has made language a thing of water and air. The beauty of the visible word and the grandeur and call of the invisible strike his prismatic imagination and are dissolved into rainbow colour. His lyrics are romantic or mystic. They have the qualities of sublimity, feminine grace, charm, delicacy and softness. They are smooth like pieces of marble; they are marvellous like magic lamps; they have the power to captivate our hearts, and splendour of magic casements if approached through a devout heart and unquestioning eye. “The songs are not to be intellectually understood, but to be heard and felt by the heart within: awareness is stirred by them to sense the touch of someone from a far.” Tagore does not fall upon the thorns of life to bleed but to elevate himself; he becomes a leaf or cloud not to be wasted or become a useless person but to serve God. He is a vessel of God, a boat sailing to God's Byzantium, a flute and lyre of Krishna. His lyrics are darshan (glimpse) of the satyam, shivam and sunderam.
In his lyrics, says Prof. A.N. Dwivedi, “sincerity of feeling and vividness of imagery combine with the moving music of verse.” In the words Dr. K.N. Joshi, “His sense of rhythm, his daring invention. of the metres, his power of yoking sound with sense, entitle him to rank amongst the foremost lyric poets of the world.” And to quote Edward Thompson, “Tagore is essentially a lyricist and the beauty of his religious lyrics is adequately presented by the English Gitanjali a book that will stir men as long as the English language is read.”