Throughout his life Tagore exhibited a passionate love for Nature. Nature delighted him more than it delighted Wordsworth or Robert Frost. He writes: “I remember when I was a child, that a row of coconut trees by our garden wall, with their branches beckoning the rising sun on the horizon, gave me a companionship as living as I was myself”. It is this companionship with Nature that his poetry tries to seem again . Agreeing with Wordsworth, he advises us not to be too much with the world:
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| Tagore’s Passionate Love for Nature in His Poetry |
“The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers.
Little we see in Nature that is ours.”
So he prepares man to see in Nature what is his. To him poetry is like dreaming. But the best are dreams of Nature and her Creator. In Tagore's words, “They are no dreams as are the harmony of bird songs, rain - washed leaves glistening in the sun, and pale clouds floating in the blue.” For him every aspect of Nature is a symbol of beauty, and has a special meaning and message:
“I believe in an ideal life, I believe that, in a little flower, there is a living power hidden in beauty which is more potent than a Maxim gum. I believe that in the bird's notes Nature expresses herself with a force which is greater than that revealed in the deafening roar of a cannonade. I believe that there is an ideal hovering over the earth - an ideal of that Paradise which in not the mere outcome of imagination. But the ultimate reality towards which all things are moving. I believe that the vision of Paradise is to be seen in the sunlight, and the green of the earth, in the flowing stream, in the beauty of spring time and the reposes of a winter morning. Everywhere in this earth the spirit of paradise is awake and sending forth its voice..."
Tagore's attitude towards Nature is neither that of the child, nor that of the pessimist, nor that of an angry man. To him Nature is a part and parcel of God. Nature and God are, in the Vedantic philosophy. Prakrit and Purusha are the two aspects of the Absolute. Meditation on Nature or an aspect of Nature leads to realization of God. So Nature in Tagore is not something imposed from outside, but the very core of the spirit.
Even when we forget about his mysticism and lyricism, Tagore remains one of the supreme poets of the beautiful landscape, gathering fruits from the garden of his poetry. He can see the beauties of Nature and hear her sweet melodies. In his poetry, there is the dancing ring of seasons; the elusive play of lights and shadows, of wind and water; the many coloured wings of erratic life flitting between life and birth. The sea, the rivers and streams, the meadow, the trees and flowers, the sail, the boat, the shepherd, the flute, the sky, the sun and the moon, the sunset, the clouds, the seasons, paths and roads, birds and wings, mountains, hills and summits, the morning and the night, the dark and the light, the village women and men, the farmer, etc. all occur and recur in his poetry, The whole rural panorama, the complete view of Nature is present in Tagore's poetry. He can see in his ‘orchard’
“..... the butterflies shake
their wings in the sun, the leaves
tremble, the fruits clamour to come
to completion.”
“The squirrels come from the boughs and climb on to his knees and the birds upon his hands;”
In Fruit -Gathering (song LXXIII), he writes:
The spring with its leaves and flowers.
has come into my body.
The bees hum there the morning long, and
the winds idly play with the shadows.
A sweet fountain springs up from
the heart of my heart
My eyes are washed with delight
Like the dewbathed morning and life
is quivering in all my limbs like the
sounding strings of the lute.
Are you wandering alone by the shore
of my life, where the tide is in flood,
O lover of my endless days?
Are my dreams flitting round you
like the moths with their many - coloured wings?
And are those your songs that
are echoing in the dark caves of my being?
Who but you can hear the hum of the crowded
hours that in my vein to – day, the clamour
of the restless life beating its wings in my body?
And again in song IV of Fruit - Gathering:
Where roads are made I lose my way.
In the wide water, in the blue sky
there is no line of a track.
The pathway is hidden by the birds’ wings by the
starfires, by the flowers of the wayfaring
seasons.
And I ask my heart if its blood carries
the wisdom of the unseen way.
What a wonderful fusion of God and Nature! Just see the following songs (13 and 14) in Crossing:
The wedding hour is in the twilight, when the
birds have sung their last and the winds are
at rest on the waters, when the sunset spreads
the carpet in the bridal chamber and the lamp
is made ready to burn through the night.
Behind the silent dark walks the Unseen Comer and my heart trembles;
All songs are hushed, for the service will be read under the evening star
In the night when noise is tired the number of the sea fills the air.
The vagrant desires of the day come back to their rest round the lighted lamp.
Love's play is stilted into worship, life's stream touches the deep and the world of forms comes to its nest in the beauty beyond all forms.
The ‘market’ for Tagore's songs is neither ‘there where the learned meddle the summer breeze with their snuff’, nor is ‘there where the man of fortune grows enormous in pride’ and flesh in his marble palace, with his book on the shelves, nor is ‘there where the young student sits’, nor is there where the bride is busy in the house, where she turns to her bedroom the moment she is free, and snatches, from under her pillows, the book of romance so roughly handled by the baby, but is.
“... there where the least
of a bird's notes is never missed
where the stream's babbling find its
full wisdom, where all the lute - strings
of the world shower their music upon
two fluttering hearts ..............” — Lover's Gift, 20.
Not only God is realized through Nature, God also appears and reappears through Nature in Tagore's poetry. For example, the poet prays to God:
“Come to me like summer clouds, spreading thy
showers from sky to sky.
Deepen the purple of the hills with thy majestic
shadows , quicken the languid forests into
flowers, and awaken in the hill - stream the
fervour of the far - away quest.
Come to me like summer cloud, stirring my heart
with the promise of hidden life, and the
gladness of the green." — Crossing, 28.
The fusion of God and Nature is the recurrent theme of Crossing and Gitanjali. In song 29, he writes:
“I have met thee where the night touches the edge
of the day; where the light startles the darkness
into dawn, and the waves carry the kiss of the one
shore to the other
From the heart of the fathomless blue comes one
golden call and across the dusk of tears, I
try to gaze at thy face and know not for
certain if thou art seen.” — Crossing, 29.
In song 32, he says:
“Your wooing is in the sunny sky thrilling in the
tremulous leaves, in the idle hours overflowing
with shepherd's piping, in the raindimmed dusk
when the heart aches with its loneliness.”
The following lines of Tagore make a summary of his approach of Nature:
The artist is the lover of nature, therefore
he is her slave and her master. —Crossing, 85.
Tagore's attitude towards Nature is that of an aesthetician; it is never of a scientist. He is of the opinion ‘By plucking her petals you do not gather the beauty of the flower; (Stray Birds, 41). Tagore once said: “We do not want nowadays temples of worship and outward rites or ceremonies. What we really want is an Ashram. We want a place where the beauty of nature and human soul meet in union.”
As a poet of Nature, Tagore has often been compared with Shelley. There are indeed, some affinities, between the two. The dynamic aspects of Nature were especially liked by Shelley. He loved the storm, the cloud, the river and the sea - waves. He loved the vast expanse of the sky and the light of the sun. Tagore also loved these aspects of Nature. The river Padma, the light of the sun and the ever - changing play of clouds in the sky were his special favourites. No doubt both Shelley and Tagore were dynamic, yet whereas Shelley's dynamism knew no restraint and was bereft of realism, Tagore had a full view of the real without losing sight of the ideal. “His pictures reveal a close and detailed observation of Nature and, considered from this point of view he has greater affinity with Keats and Tennyson, with Shelley.”
The current of realism is strong in Tagore that it does not ignore the darker aspects of Nature. “Nature red in tooth and claw” was not unknown to him as it was in the case of Wordsworth. Barsha Shesh (in Kalpana) and Sea - Waves (in Manasi) give us an illustration of Tagore's picturesque descriptions of Nature in her terrible mood. In the former poem Tagore gives the following account of New Year:
Like fruit, shaken free by an impatient wind
from the veils of its mother flower,
thou comest, New Year, whirling in a frantic dance
amidst the stampede of the wind - lashed clouds
and infuriate showers,
while tramped by thy turbulence
are scattered away the faded and the frail
in and eddying agony of death.
Thou art no dreamer afloat on a language breeze
lingering among the hesitant whisper and hum
of an uncertain season.
Thine is a majestic march, O terrible Stranger,
thundering forth an ominous incantation,
driving the days on the perils of a pathless
dark, where thou carriest a dumb signal in thy
banner, a decree of destiny undeciphered.
Then we have this ugly picture of Nature in Sea Waves, a poem which was composed on the sad occasion of the sinking of a pilgrimship carrying eight hundred passengers to Puri in 1887. The first stanza of this poem (as translated by Edward Thompson) reads as follows:
On the breast of the shoreless sea
Destruction swings and sweeps, in dreadful festival,
The indomitable wind is roaming, ungovernable, in strength,
Beating its thousand wings
Sky and sea in one are reeling together in vast confusion;
Darkness veils the eyes of the universe.
The lightning flashes and threatens, the foam - fields hiss,
The sharp white terrible mirth of brute Nature.
Eyeless earless houseless loveless,
The mad Forces of Evil
Fush to ruin, without direction, they have cast off
all restraints.
But at the same time there is no dearth of quiet pictures in the poetry of Tagore. Manasi and Chaitali abound in splendid pictures. The Kokil's Call and Expectation occur in Manasi. The former gives us a final picture of the silent moon. The calm atmosphere of evening is beautifully portrayed in the letter. A sense of leisureliness and peace is the pervading atmosphere in Chaitali. Here is a poem (No. LXXXIV) that occurs in The Gardener:
Over the green and yellow rice - fields weep
the shadows of the autumn clouds followed
by the swift - chasing sun.
The bees forgets to sip their honey; drunken with
light they foolishly hover and hum.
The ducks in the islands of the river clamour
in joy for mere nothing
Let none go back home, brother, this
morning, let none go to work.
Let us take the blue sky by storm and plunder space as we run.
Laughter floats in the air like foam on the flood.
Brother, let us squander our morning in futile songs.
Thus we find that Tagore has described Nature in all her different aspects. Sometimes Nature echoes the Divine as it does in Wordsworth; sometimes the poet explores its dynamic and destructive role like Shelley; at other times rather most of the times, he observes the beauties of Nature like Keats and Tennyson and enjoys them. ‘The nature - poems of Tagore in the original Bengali language contain a happy blend of music and pictures. This rare combination of the musical and pictorial quality is another great characteristic of his poetry of Nature.’