Tagore is a great believer in God. Without God his poetry will look very shallow, although there would be critics to regard him as a great poet of Love and of Nature. In fact, there are two phases in Tagore's poetry, In the earlier phase Tagore is pre - eminently a lyrical poet of love; in the later phase he is essentially a mystic poet, a great lover of God. From God to man and from man to God is a frequent transition we witness in his poetry. He fuses Nature and God. Several times he looks at God as a Gopi will look at Madhav. Several times he emphasizes Radha - Krishan relationship.
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| Treatment of God in Gitanjali |
Tagore's God is not the ‘ultimate’ of Dante, nor the Upanishadic ‘essence in which we must lose our identity.’ Others may indulge in the controversy about God's existence. But Tagore knows that He exists. Tagore's love for God includes love for everything which He has created. In his “Religion and Man”, Tagore says, “I was sure that speaking about the Supreme Love, whose touch we experience in all our relations of love the love, whose touch we experience in all our relations of love the love of nature's beauty, of the animal, the child, the comrade, the beloved, the love that illuminates our consciousness of reality”. Love makes us immortal and deathless. “When do you find the touch of immortality in things mortal?” Tagore asks, “When there is love. It is love that casts the shadow of the infinite and keeps the old perpetually young and does not acknowledge death."
Tagore does not tie God with any cult, although he is very much influenced by the Vaishnavites, like a true mystic in Crossing, 33. He says:
I know not if I have found him or I am seeking him everywhere, if it is a pang of bliss or of pain.
Yet he knows that he has reached near God. Whether a man is united or not united with Him is immaterial. What is significant is the effort of soul to unite with God:
My heart bends in worship like a dewladen flower, and I feel the flood of my rushing to the endless. (Crossing, 38)
If a devotee is full of worship and offers sincere and truthful prayers to his Maker, he is bound to realize with Tagore God's presence and express:
I have reached the brink of the shoreless sea to take my plunge and lose myself for ever. (Crossing, 37)
Tagore as a poet of Love is the combination of Mira and Kabir, Surdas, Chandidas. Like a true bhakta he expresses—Accept me, my lord, accept me for this while. Let those orphaned days that passed without thee be forgotten. (Crossing, 4)
Crossing is a collection of poems in which Tagore wants to cross to the world of God from that of Maya. He regrets that the realization has been a little late:
When I travelled in the day I felt secure, and I did not heed the wonder of thy road, for I was proud of my speed; thy own light stood between me and thy presence. Now it is night and I feel thy road at every step in the dark and the scent of flowers filling the silence- like mother's whisper to the child when the light is out.
I hold tight thy hand and thy touch is with me in my loneliness. (Crossing, 55)
Prayers of this nature are numerous. For example, see another one:
…..Hold thou my hand.
Deliver me from despair
Touch with thy flame the lightless lamp of my sorrow.
Waken my tired strength from its sleep.......
The surrender of the soul, the fulfilment of love, and the union with the other spirit, characteristic of human love, are present in the longing for the Absolute. Spiritual longing is expressed in material symbols. Namdeo, Vallabh, Acharya, Kabir, Chandidas and Chaitanya belong to a long historic tradition behind Tagore. Union has its own charms and pleasures. But sweet are the uses of Separation. Separation has its own significance. Tagore himself says: “woman’s love sings the song of the union but man's love sings of mournful separation.” In section 84 of Gitanjali, he sings:
It is the pang of separation that spreads throughout the world and gives birth to shapes innumerable in the infinite sky.
It is the sorrow of separation that gazes in silence all night from star to star and becomes a lyric among rustling leaves in rainy darkness of July.
It is this over spreading pain that deepens into loves and desires, into suffering and joys in human homes, and this it is that ever melts and flows in songs through my poet's heart.
Gitanjali is steeped deeply in God's colour. In the first verse, the poet is a little flute of a reed which God has carried over hills and dales, or is ‘a vessel’ which He empties again and again, and fills it ever with fresh life, In the second verse, “Drunk with the joy of singing I forget myself and call thee friend who art my lord.” In the third verse, “I know not how thou singest, my master: I ever listen in silent amazement,” and that “The light of thy music illumines the world” In the fourth verse, God is the ‘life of my life’ In the fifth verse, ‘Away from the sight of thy face my heart knows no rest nor respite ....... In the sixth verse, the poet becomes a little flower and requests God to pluck it with His hand before it gets faint. In the seventh verse, the poet prays to God to make his life simple and straight,’ ‘like a flute of reed for thee to fill with music.’ So hardly there is any verse in Tagore's ‘Gitanjali’ which is free from God. Undoubtedly Gitanjali is an offering of songs to God.
M. Abbe Bremond once declared that pure poetry aspires to a condition of prayer. Such poetry is half a prayer from below, half a whisper from above: The prayer evoking the response, or the whisper provoking the prayer, and always prayer and whisper chiming into song. Gitanjali is full of such poetry.