Tagore is a romanticist by temperament too. He drew inspiration from Keats the celebrated romantic poet of England. In fact, the poem “Chhabi” in Balaka repeats the theme of Keats “Ode on a Grecian Urn”, when it mentions that a work of art is as real as the “stars” and the “sky”. Shelley's Hymn to Intellectual Beauty was another potent influence on Tagore. Edward Thompson says, “When he wrote Evening Songs, his mind resembled Shelley's in many things, in his emotional misery, his mythopoeia, his personified abstractions.”
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| R.N. Tagore As A Romantic Poet |
In the words of Prof. Abidi, “Tagore is a profound romantic like Wordsworth. Whereas Wordsworth's romanticism is linked with his pantheistic philosophy, Tagore's is elemental and primary. Tagore has no philosophy, or theology.” Miss May Sinclair , the American novelist, writing to the New York Evening Post in May, 1913, put Tagore higher than Shelley and Swinburne and remarked that Gitanjali was more melodious than Swinburne's poetry, and its message was profounder than the subjectivity, intensity and philosophic thoughts of Shelley.
According to Sri Aurobindo, Tagore is accused in his own country of an unsubstantial poetic philosophising, a lack of actuality, of reality of touch and force of his vital insistence. Western critics too have elaborately emphasized the mystic and romantic notes in Tagore's poetry. The most vociferous is Edward Thompson as well as Dr. Aronson who through his book Rabindranath through Western Eyes has explicated the western evaluation of Tagore's poetry and who say that Rabindranath “was hailed as a prophet of the East coming to deliver his message of goodwill and fraternity among men.”
Numerous factors necessitate poetic colouring in Tagore's prose. He was a poet with a passion for lyrics imagery set in a profuse and gorgeous mosaic. He was a landscape painter lost in glory of opalescent mist and shadows of ethereal tincture. And he was a Delphic oracle— perpetually in an ecstasy of admiration, the odour of sympathy, or the grand burst of prophetic warning— who could not d diminish his pace to the plain foot - plodding of Macaulay's journalistic prose. While there were millions of people engaged in dry talks, Tagore infused life into language. He was a word - smith who by no mean art expressed a golden idea fitly and aptly in golden words.
If Tagore pelts us with perfumed flowers or dazzles us with it blaze of colour, it is because he himself is intoxicated with the s blossoming of thought and cannot help breathing the divine afflatus into our souls. No other romantic poet perhaps has reached the sublimity of Tagore. Besides inherent psychological tendencies, Tagore's tapestry - weaving has been moulded by the masters of grand style. His juvenile literary monuments are obtrusively luscious. They are permeated with grandeur and adorned with sonorous sweetness.
“Tagore's romanticism as manifested in Gitanjali lies in his sense of awe and wonder at creation, passionate love of Nature, love for children and delight in childhood, love for the common humanity, concern with the infinite and something afar, romantic imagination, romantic imagery, lyrical intensity and free play of emotion.” Tagore is a romantic poet also because of his love for beauty and freedom as well as his humanism.
Tagore is a great humanist. He is a lover of humanity and throughout his life he lived for human values. He believes that God is to be found not in chanting hymns in the temple or in the telling of beads in an ivory tower but through participation in the humble day to T day activity of life. If we want God, we must go and mix with the tillers of the soil, the path makers and woodcutters with humility and on terms of equality. Tagore is not an ascetic who preaches o renunciation of life but he is a spiritual humanist.
Tagore's poetry incorporates both mysticism and humanism which are the chief features of romantic poetry. Tagore's poetry is the singing of gold by a saint. It is an offering of songs to God. He simply acknowledges his greatness and grandeur of thought. Like a to mystic he exclaims:
“My guide,
I am a wayfarer of an endless road,
Like a flock of homesick cranes flying night and day
back to their mountain nests.
Let all my life take its voyage to its external home in
one salutation to thee.”
Most romantic poets were rebels. Tagore also is a rebel against orthodoxy, superstition, ignorance, slavery, falsehood, poverty and a number of other evils. He is a champion of the underdog. “A true friend of the oppressed people, Tagore revolted time and again against the social injustice meted out to them. In his innumerable poems, speeches, novels and editorials, he raised his finger uttering notes of warnings against the exploitation of weak by the strong. He never missed any chance to stand against a wrong action, be it in his own country, or abroad. He often revolted against the rigid orthodoxies of his country against the conservative superstitions, the crumbling structure of society, the evil casteism prevailing in his country for ages.”
The rebel poet gave a clarion call to the Brahmins, the law makers, and asked them to give these ignorant simpletons their due place in society. They must leave their pseudo - superstitions, their vain egoistic glory and superiority complex otherwise their future was doomed to destruction. He stood for justice. He says:
“He who commits an unjust act,
And he who tolerates an unjust act calmly,
Must be burnt by thy contempt like a tiny blade of grass.”
In Ebar Phirao Moray Tagore warns the exploited humanity to raise its voice of protest against all oppressions. There, he says, it was only because the exploited humanity kept silent and tolerated calmly the torture that emboldened the tyrant to repeat his tyranny. By yielding to injustice a person degrades himself and turns into a coward. The tyrant has no ideals and has no moral support behind him. Intrinsically the tyrant is a coward and cannot withstand any strong opposition, and ultimately loses the battle. To the world he proclaims:
“Humanity oppressed must live again
With food, with life,
With light, with air,
With strength, with health, with joy
A robust heart full of courage
Free of fear........”
Thus, Tagore revolted against slavery, against wrong religious notions and against machine age.
In his personal life Tagore had to face a number of misfortunes and calamities. In the beginning of the twentieth century, he lost his preceptor, his father, and beloved wife. The same year in 1902, he lost his second daughter, and very soon one of his sons. The pathos of his heart has been recorded in his famous poems Smaran and The Crescent Moon. But he is a sage poet. He turns his melancholia very subtly into prayers and offerings to God and escapes into the lap of God, sometimes like Radha, sometimes like Sufi beloved, and sometimes like a faithful devotee. Just mark a few lines:
1. “The night is dark and my heart is fearful
yet I will take up the lamp;
open my gates, and bow to him my welcome."
2. “The evening star will come out when my voyage is
done and the plaintive notes of the twilight
melodies be struck up from the king's gateways.”
Tagore has a true romantic sensibility. But he does not beat his luminous wings in the void in vain. He is a lover of truth and beauty and is influenced by the Vedic and Upanishadic thoughts, the Geeta and Buddhism. He worshipped like Keats both Truth and Beauty. Gitanjali, Gitali, Gitimalya, Naibedya and his other poetic collection as well as plays consist of poems or passages in appreciation and adoration of Truth. In the words of Edward Thompson, “Urbasi is ............ the most unalloyed and perfect worship of Beauty which the world's literature contains. Tagore's poetry reveals him as a lover of Beauty both spiritual and physical.”
Like Frost, Wordsworth and Keats, Tagore is a lover of Nature. He loves Nature for her purer beauties and the sensuous beauty. To him Nature is suffused with the presence of the Divine. Nature is a great source of consolation to Tagore. For example, a tiny flower t among the thorns becomes a symbol of life. Sometimes he finds o Nature suffused with human emotions. In Gitanjali, he finds the id eternal and the Infinite in the most commonplace objects and phenomena of nature. He gets a sensuous pleasure in the observation of the objects of Nature too. Nature is also exploited by him as a rich source of images.
His emotional preference, his mental - make up, his love for music, melody, and simple language, his choice of rustic subjects and objects for his poetry, coupled with his love for freedom, for the suffering man, for the down - trodden and the under - dog, his rich imagination, his lyricism and several other things mentioned earlier truly often make him a great romantic poet. His poetry often impresses us with the Blake - like simplicity and innocence of experience. His imaginative treatment of science, romantic fancy and sensibility, romantic glorification of the child and depiction of child life and psychology, his humanism, and his mysticism all inspire us to regard Tagore as a lyric romantic poet. He is a true lyricist, perhaps the greatest lyric romantic poet of Bengal. Like Wordsworth his head also dances with joy when he sees an object of Nature, and he gives a lyric cry:
“Like a peacock dances my heart,
dances my heart,
dances my heart.”
His genius was essentially lyrical like that of many other romantic poets. His lyrics are subjective like those of Shelley and Keats. His lyrics are the poems of supreme beauty. They shine like a smile. Some of them glisten like lightning in the darkness of the soul. Sarojini Naidu was right when she observed that Tagore's lyrics are the “lyric of heaven.”
Tagore's romanticism looks like a delicate woman in a graceful saree of mysticism. It is because he is intoxicated with the blossoming of thought and cannot help breathing the divine afflatus into our souls. Dr. B.C. Chakravorty has given the following estimate of Tagore as a romantic poet:
“We have in English literature romantic poets like Shelley and Keats, religious poets like Francis Thompson and realists like Eliot, Auden and Spender. But Tagore holds a unique position in the realm of poetry on account of the fact that he has combined in himself the romanticism of Shelley, the mysticism of Francis Thompson and the realism of Eliot, Auden and Spender. He has given us the songs of childhood in The Crescent Moon, the songs of human love in The Gardener, the songs of divine love of Gitanjali and the songs of common humanity in Poems. These works have enriched the English language and are his lasting contribution to English literature.
Throughout his poetic career, he has never lost his sense of balance and proportion. His romanticism has always been tinged with realism. His realism has never sunk down to the level of sordid materialism and his mysticism has never denied the claims of humanism.”