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Rabindranath Tagore

1861 AD — 1941 AD

Bengali writer, composer and educator whose work crosses poetry and public life. The linked Gitanjali offers his own English prose translations; supplied archive attributions retain their uncertainty.

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▷ Play this voiceSearch within this voice ↗Place in time ↗lifelovetimefaithlearningnaturewisdomdeath

Life and writing

Rabindranath Tagore lived from 1861 to 1941. He wrote poetry, fiction and plays, composed music and worked in education. His school at Santiniketan and the later Visva-Bharati institution put educational ideas into practice. This wider activity offers a useful frame for reading his work: a brief lyrical passage belongs to a writer whose interests also reached learning, community and cultural exchange.

Visva-Bharati — Rabindranath Tagore, the founder ↗ Founder biography: lifetime, literary forms, music and educational institutions

Gitanjali: Song Offerings presents English prose translations made by Tagore from Bengali, with a separate introduction by W. B. Yeats. Read its numbered poems as complete units and distinguish the translator-author’s voice from the introduction. The edition is a reading destination for this writer; its presence does not establish that the separately supplied quotations in this archive occur in Gitanjali or use his own English wording.

Project Gutenberg — Gitanjali, PG 7164 ↗ PG7164 title page, author-made prose translations and separate introduction; original reading guidance

Reading this voice

Begin with a complete numbered poem in Gitanjali, then follow its images through the surrounding lines. Ask who speaks, who is addressed and how a concrete image changes an abstract idea. The selected archive passages carry contributor-supplied attributions that have not been independently authenticated here; they are editorial starting points, not verified excerpts from this edition. The profile’s life years do not date those entries: their undated status and original wording remain unchanged.

Subjects to explore

Editorial reading connections, distinct from the archive’s word matching.

lifelovefaithlearning

A work to read

Begin with these archive passages

Editorial starting points from this author’s existing entries.

Profile sources and editorial status

Original agent-assisted editorial profile, checked 2026-10-05. No human review is recorded. Life dates are recorded to the year; they do not date individual quotations.

Archive entries

01Undated
In learning a language, when from mere words we reach the laws of words, we have gained a great deal. But if we stop at that point and concern ourselves only with the marvels of the formation of a language, seeking the hidden reason of all its apparent caprices, we do not reach that end, for grammar is not literature… When we come to literature, we find that, though it conforms to the rules of grammar, it is yet a thing of joy; it is freedom itself. The beauty of a poem is bound by strict laws, yet it transcends them. The laws are its wings. They do not keep it weighed down. They carry it to freedom. Its form is in law, but its spirit is in beauty. Law is the first step toward freedom, and beauty is the complete liberation which stands on the pedestal of law. Beauty harmonizes in itself the limit and the beyond – the law and the liberty.
Rabindranath Tagore / quote
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03Undated
The time has come when I must divest Bimala of all the ideal decorations with which I decked her. It was owing to my own weakness that I indulged in such idolatry. I was too greedy. I created an angel of Bimala, in order to exaggerate my own enjoyment. But Bimala is what she is. It is preposterous to expect that she should assume the role of an angel for my pleasure. The Creator is under no obligation to supply me with angels, just because I have an avidity for imaginary perfection.
Rabindranath Tagore / quote
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04Undated
We women are weak," replied Bimala. "So I suppose we must join in the conspiracy of the weak.""Women weak!" I exclaimed with a laugh. "Men belaud you as delicate and fragile, so as to delude you into thinking yourselves weak. But it is you women who are strong. Men make a great outward show of their so-called freedom, but those who know their inner minds are aware of their bondage. They havemanufactured scriptures with their own hands to bind themselves; with their very idealism they have made golden fetters of women to wind round their body and mind. If men had not that extraordinary faculty of entangling themselves in meshes of their own contriving, nothing could have kept them bound. But as foryou women, you have desired to conceive reality with body and soul. You have given birth to reality. You have suckled reality at your breasts.
Rabindranath Tagore / quote
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09Undated
When the heart is hard and parched up, come upon me with a shower of mercy.When grace is lost from life, come with a burst of song.When tumultuous work raises its din on all sides shutting me out from beyond, come to me, my lord of silence, with thy peace and rest.When my beggarly heart sits crouched, shut up in a corner, break open the door, my king, and come with the ceremony of a king.When desire blinds the mind with delusion and dust, O thou holy one, thou wakeful, come with thy light and thy thunder.
Rabindranath Tagore / quote
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11Undated
I sat wondering: Why is there always this deep shade of melancholy over the fields arid river banks, the sky and the sunshine of our country? And I came to the conclusion that it is because with us Nature is obviously the more important thing. The sky is free, the fields limitless; and the sun merges them into one blazing whole. In the midst of this, man seems so trivial. He comes and goes, like the ferry-boat, from this shore to the other; the babbling hum of his talk, the fitful echo of his song, is heard; the slight movement of his pursuit of his own petty desires is seen in the world's market-places: but how feeble, how temporary, how tragically meaningless it all seems amidst the immense aloofness of the Universe! The contrast between the beautiful, broad, unalloyed peace of Nature—calm, passive, silent, unfathomable,—and our own everyday worries—paltry, sorrow-laden, strife-tormented, puts me beside myself as I keep staring at the hazy, distant, blue line of trees which fringe the fields across the river. Where Nature is ever hidden, and cowers under mist and cloud, snow and darkness, there man feels himself master; he regards his desires, his works, as permanent; he wants to perpetuate them, he looks towards posterity, he raises monuments, he writes biographies; he even goes the length of erecting tombstones over the dead. So busy is he that he has not time to consider how many monuments crumble, how often names are forgotten!
Rabindranath Tagore / quote
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16Undated
It was the Kojagar full moon, and I was slowly pacing the riverside conversing with myself. It could hardly be called a conversation, as I was doing all the talking and my imaginary companion all the listening. The poor fellow had no chance of speaking up for himself, for was not mine the power to compel him helplessly to answer like a fool?But what a night it was! How often have I tried to write of such, but never got it done! There was not a line of ripple on the river; and from away over there, where the farthest shore of the distant main stream is seen beyond the other edge of the midway belt of sand, right up to this shore, glimmers a broad band of moonlight. Not a human being, not a boat in sight; not a tree, nor blade of grass on the fresh-formed island sand-bank.It seemed as though a desolate moon was rising upon a devastated earth; a random river wandering through a lifeless solitude; a long-drawn fairy-tale coming to a close over a deserted world,—all the kings and the princesses, their ministers and friends and their golden castles vanished, leaving the Seven Seas and Thirteen Rivers and the Unending Moor, over which the adventurous princes fared forth, wanly gleaming in the pale moonlight. I was pacing up and down like the last pulse-beats of this dying world. Every one else seemed to be on the opposite shore—the shore of life—where the British Government and the Nineteenth Century hold sway, and tea and cigarettes.
Rabindranath Tagore / quote
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Gitanjali: Song Offerings

Rabindranath Tagore

Free edition · US public domain

Project Gutenberg eBook 7164; English prose translations from Bengali made by the author, with an introduction by W. B. Yeats. Released 2004, updated 2023; no printed publisher/year inferred from the linked transcription.

Related work by the same author; the linked edition is separate from the anthology source.

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