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Apr. 2nd, 2009 11:30 amAnother good "kickoff" poem for Poetry Month....
The Gardener (verse 85)
by Rabindranath Tagore
Who are you, reader, reading my poems an hundred years hence?
I cannot send you one single flower from this wealth of the spring,
one single streak of gold from yonder clouds.
Open your doors and look abroad.
From your blossoming garden gather fragrant memories of the vanished
flowers of an hundred years before.
In the joy of your heart may you feel the living joy that sang one
spring morning, sending its glad voice across a hundred years.
I love the way it speaks of a connection to history -- not talking about history itself, not in any sweeping sense, but inviting the reader to open their imagination and make their own visceral connection to the reality of the past. It's not quite an hundred years hence yet -- the poem was published in 1915 -- but it's near enough. I wonder what he would have thought of this verse being preserved digitally, in a medium that distances his poem even further from the senses. Then again, the message of the poem is that he can only give so much, and the rest is up to the reader to experience.
Rabindranath Tagore was a Bengali artist and writer around the turn of the last century, part of a movement that celebrated Indian culture but rejected traditional cultural formulae in the arts. This is the closing stanza of a longer work, translated from the original Bengali by the author. You can find more of his work here.
The Gardener (verse 85)
by Rabindranath Tagore
Who are you, reader, reading my poems an hundred years hence?
I cannot send you one single flower from this wealth of the spring,
one single streak of gold from yonder clouds.
Open your doors and look abroad.
From your blossoming garden gather fragrant memories of the vanished
flowers of an hundred years before.
In the joy of your heart may you feel the living joy that sang one
spring morning, sending its glad voice across a hundred years.
I love the way it speaks of a connection to history -- not talking about history itself, not in any sweeping sense, but inviting the reader to open their imagination and make their own visceral connection to the reality of the past. It's not quite an hundred years hence yet -- the poem was published in 1915 -- but it's near enough. I wonder what he would have thought of this verse being preserved digitally, in a medium that distances his poem even further from the senses. Then again, the message of the poem is that he can only give so much, and the rest is up to the reader to experience.
Rabindranath Tagore was a Bengali artist and writer around the turn of the last century, part of a movement that celebrated Indian culture but rejected traditional cultural formulae in the arts. This is the closing stanza of a longer work, translated from the original Bengali by the author. You can find more of his work here.
