Rabindranath Tagore is a blend of mystic, romanticist, realist, humanist and lyricist. His poetry is the singing of gold by a saint in the beautiful pasture land of God. He is a mystic poet because of his strong belief in God, his aspiration to seek a communion with God. He believes in the immortality of soul and treatment of death as a gateway to eternal life. Like all other mystic poets he believes in the mystery of Creation, is highly imaginative and looks for the presence of God now in man and now in the cosmos. He is baffled at the mystery of creation and is a seeker after God.
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| R.N. Tagore’s Mysticism in His Poetry |
Tagore has written songs that issue from his touch with the soul of existence— the inwardness of the thing, its essence, its beauty and truth which we experience when we have stepped into a sort of oneness with the thing. This soul of existence takes various symbolic forms in Tagore's Gitanjali and in most of his plays. It appears as the poet's God, Life of Life, Lover and beloved, besides, as mere ineffable spirit of being and beauty. It also appears sometimes, as a flood of light and mirth:
“Light, my light the world - filling light, the eye - kissing
light, heart-sweetening light. Ah, the light dances, my
darling, at the centre of my life; the light strikes, my
darling, the chords of my love, the sky opens, the
wind runs wild, laughter passes over the earth.”
Like a true mystic and God's devotee, he always craves for the union of soul with God. This craving becomes very intense during the Gitanjali phase. Just mark a few of his mystic utterances from the Gitanjali:
1. Life of my life, I shall ever try to keep my
body pure, knowing that thy living touch is upon all my limbs.
2. I shall ever try to drive all evils away from my
heart and keep my love in flower, knowing that
thou hast thy seat in the inmost shrine of my heart.
3. 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,
like a flute of reed for thee to fill with music.
4. 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.
5. 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 gateway.
He has given us the songs of childhood in The Crescent Moon, the songs of divine love in Gitanjali and the songs of common humanity in Poems. These works have enriched the English language and are his lasting contributions to English literature. “During the twenties and thirties of this century, when the English poets like Eliot, Auden, Spender and Day Lewis were baffled by the greatest spiritual crisis in human history, he alone retained his faith in the divinity of man.” He has shown in his Poems how to reconcile the claims of the material and spiritual values of life. He has explained in Creative Unity how mankind can be united only by the spiritual bond of love and friendship. He has asserted in The Religion of Man that the only religion of man is service to humanity.
Tagore does not question God's ways and His designs. He simply acknowledges His greatness and glory. Everything else is naught. There is no need, indeed, then to question what life is and what death means. The distinction between life and death gets blurred: the only thing left is the bright ray of God's realization, and the only desire is soul's craving to meet the Creator:
“I will meet one day the Life within me, the joy that hides in my life, though the days perplex my path with their idle dust.”
“I have known it in glimpses, and its fitful breath has come upon me making my thoughts fragrant for a while.”
“I will meet one day the joy without me that dwells behind the screen of light and will stand in the overflowing solitude where all things are seen as by their creator."
Seeing God is not really his business, but waiting. Like Amal in The Post Office, he makes a career of waiting and without God there be nothing to wait for. Waiting for God is the theme of his later poetry. Getting and meeting God will someday be possible. They also serve Him who waits for him. Hence endless waiting for God can bring to the poet endless joy and bliss of God. In Crossing he says:
"I know that my dreams that are still unfulfilled, and
my melodies still unstruck, are clinging to some lute –
strings of thine , and they are not altogether lost." (XVIII)
Like a true devotee of God, he is ready to wait and wait:
"I am the weary earth of summer bare of life and
parched. I wait for thy shower to come down in the
night when I open my breast and receive it in silence.
I long to give thee in return my songs and flowers.
But empty is my store, and only the deep sigh
rises from my heart through the withered grass.
But I know that thou will wait for the morning
when my hours will brim with their riches." — Crossing, (XXVII)
Waiting is significant, but Union has its own bliss. The poet, therefore, says:
“I have come to thee to take thy touch before
I begin my day.
Let the eyes rest upon my eyes for a while.
Let me take to my work the assurance of thy
comradeship, my friend.
Fill my mind with thy music to last through the
desert of noise:
Let thy Love's sunshine kiss the peaks of my
thoughts and linger in my life's valley,
where the harvest ripens."
The moments of union are rare and ephemeral; letters and messages are received far more often than the guest, and it is not hinted that the former are of less value. What are stressed are desires and separation and hope without assurance, and promises which may not be realised but are held dear because they are promises from afar.
From God to mortality, from mortality to God is a frequent transition we witness in Gitanjali, for him this world is a book with God's signature on every page, and the thing to do is to decipher that signature. Man, the world and God interpenetrate in his poems and enter into a personal and poignant relationship. He begins to find Death as the Messenger of God.
Gitanjali demonstrates his sense of awe and wonder at creation, passionate love of man, of Nature and of God. The poet's mystical leanings project themselves in every nook and corner of the Gitanjali:
Thou didst not turn in contempt from my childish play amongst dust, and the steps that I heard in my play room are the same that are echoing from star to star. — XLIII;
Undoubtedly, “The Gitanjali contains some of the finest expressions of his mystic experience and has a place equally in the mystic literature of the world as the finest poetry of our time.” Gitanjali is, indeed, a deeply mystic poem. It is Tagore's spiritual autobiography and the voice of his own soul. In the words of Dr. Radhakrishnan, “The poems of Gitanjali are the offerings of the finite to the infinite. The central themes of Gitanjali are God and Death which is a way to God. In other words, its central theme is the realization of God through self - purification, love, constant prayer, devotion, dedication and surrender before God, through service to humanity, through karma yoga and detachment from too much worldliness without renouncing the world. Briefly speaking, Gitanjali is soul's voyage to eternity. “Rightly says Prof. Amalendu Bose, “In Gitanjali we go far beyond doctrine and ritualism. In Gitanjali we have the Religion of Man, the religion that comprehends the whole life and nature, the Here and Hereafter, the Boundless and the Limited the body, the mind, the soul.”
Others may believe in God. Tagore knows He exists. Tagore's songs are full of hope and redemption for the modern man whose soul has gone to the dogs of materialism. He is a mystic because he seeks tryst with the divine , he shrinks from the material things of life, he perceives reality intuitively and finds God both within and without, he sees the worlds as a great unity, he binds the knower and the known into one, he recognizes internal consciousness, and feels divine presence everywhere. He concludes his Crossing:
“My guide,
I am a wayfarer of an endless road,
My greetings of a wanderer to thee.” (CII)
And his Gitanjali ends with the note:
Like a flock of homesick cranes flying night and day back to noun their mountain nests let all my life take its voyage to its eternal home in one salutation to thee.
Verner von Heidenstam, who had known Gitanjali in Swedish translation and who was himself awarded the Nobel Prize three years later, wrote:
“I was deeply moved when I read them (the Gitanjali poems) and I do not remember having read any lyric writing to equal them during the past twenty years, or more. They gave me hours of intense enjoyment; it was like drinking the water of a fresh, clear spring. The intense and loving piety that permeates his every thought and feeling, the purity of heart, the noble and natural sublimity of his style, all combine to create a whole that has a deep and rare spiritual beauty. There is nothing in his work that is controversial and offensive, nothing vain, worldly and petty, and if ever a poet may be said to possess the qualities that make him entitled to a Nobel Prize, it is he......”
In the words of Dr. Chakravorty, “Gitanjali gave Rabindranath the place of a mystic in the world of letters. I have no doubt in my mind that the day has come when he will be regarded by the English speaking world as a great realist who has also been the greatest exponent of the divinity in man.” Similar views have been expressed by another Indian critic: “The songs of Gitanjali are songs mainly of the closest personal connection between the poet and the Eternal, as lover and Beloved, wife and Husband, servant and Master, friend and Friend, as if the poet were trying to approach Reality in a personal way through personal relationship .......... These songs are there 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 afar. To try to ignore them as enervating and effeminate would be only a betrayal of the human heart.
Tagore's mysticism is neither a theoretician's creed nor a priest's preaching, nor a philosopher's acrobatics. It is a practical way to life. As mentioned by J. H. Cousins, “his religion is without the theology though not without personality; his philosophy is without argument, though not without rationale. The outstanding quality that shows in every line of his poetry is life.” He never advocates a renunciation of life. His view of life is not that of an ascetic. His advice to the priest is to leave his singing and chanting, and seek God where the tillers are tilling the soil or path - makers breaking stones. God is not to be found in the temple or through the secluded life of an ascetic but through love and service of our fellow - men. Humility is the virtue which the devotee must cultivate before he can enjoy the ineffable bliss of God. He seeks union with God through union with his fellow men. Thus his mysticism is not a cry in wilderness. He blends his mysticism with humanism and love for Nature. He wants to seek both God and the world which is a beautiful manifestation of the Eternal Beauty of God. For him this world is a book with God's signature on every page.
Tagore was once made the President of the All - India Philosophical Congress, and Sarvapalli Radhakrishnan justly pointed out that Tagore may not have a philosophy, as that word and discipline are now understood, but he is the creator of a philosophy of man and culture and, above all, his quest of beauty and the meaning of art.
It has rightly been asked by an English newspaper:
“A mystic? What kind of mystic is this who hymns the passion of love, youth, motherland, in our ecstasy of the sense. He feels the sharp sting of life. He sings its hardships and repulsion. When it leaves him he is left in a dreamy contemplation."
At the same time there has been some unfavourable commentary in the West. George Sampson says, “Indeed, it is difficult to find in his numerous volumes - Gitanjali ( 1912 ), The Crescent Moon (1913), Fruit Gathering (1916), The Gardener and others - anything richer in thought and expression, than the pages of the English Bible afford to the receptive leader.” But such an evaluation is a result of the failure to see in Tagore the harmony between mysticism and humanism, between romanticism and realism. In fact, Tagore has combined in himself the romanticism of Shelley, the mysticism of Francis Thompson and the realism of Eliot, Auden and Spender.
Father Fallon has pertinently warned: “A misunderstanding must be dissipated. Tagore's reputation as a predominantly ‘mystic’ poet should be exercised. This is to say that while attempting the total evaluation of Tagore as a poet other aspects of his poetry should not be neglected. But at the same time it should also be kept in mind that Tagore himself has said in his Reminiscences.” The joy of attaining the infinite within the finite, this has been the subject on which my writings have dwelt.