Discuss Rabindranath Tagore as a poet.

Ans.

Tagore, India’s Great Genius

Tagore occupies an eminent place among Indian poets. He is rightly called India’s Chaucer and Shakespeare, Shelley and Keats, Wordsworth and Browning, Dante and Hugo. Goethe and Tolstoy, Emerson and Whitman. He is a poet par excellence. His plays, short stories, novels essays and speeches abound in poetry. There is no exaggeration in calling him a ‘pure poet’. There is no purpose, no conscious morality in his poems and in this respect he stands unrivalled. His religion essentially is a poet’s religion. Its touch comes to him through the same unseen and trackless channels as does the inspiration of his music. His religious life has followed the same mysterious line of growth as has his political life.

Variety of Themes and Originality in Thought and Expression

No other Indo-English poet either before or after him showed so much freshness and fecundity of imagination in glorifying the common objects of nature, world and human life, and in this respect he stands in front rank in Indo English romantic poetry. Gitanjali, the greatest contribution of Tagore to Indian poetry, is mainly a collection of lyrics of devotion in the great Indian tradition. Closely related with the main theme, other notes too, i.e., love of nature, love of humanity and world and love of the motherland, are heard. The Crescent Moon is based on the theme of the glorification of childhood, and in this respect Tagore is very much akin to the English romantics Blake and Wordsworth. The Gardner is the richest collection of love lyrics in Indo-English poetry. Stray Birds is a collection of gem-like thoughts or musings. Fruit Gathering, Lover’s Gift and Crossing, and the The Fugitive show a decline in Tagore’s poetic power and have much in common with Gitanjali both in thought and expression.

Tagore’s Mysticism

We must remember that Rabindranath, the mystic, is fundamentally different from the other mystic poets who usually ignore this earth and its people and look for salvation in the other world. Tagore’s mysticism is combined with realism and humanism. It is not a philosophy that asks us to renounce the world and its activities. It is a philosophy based on the acceptance of the world as real and this life as earnest and sincere. Tagore goes even farther than this. He maintains that the divine cannot be realized by renouncing the world. He has to be realized in this very life in the hearts of ordinary men and women of the world.

His Romanticism

Tagore’s romanticism finds expression in his feeling of awe and wonder at creation, love of God and nature, glorification of childhood, humanity, condemnation of materialism, love of simplicity. sublimation of the commonplace, romantic imagination, intensity of feelings and emotions, and highly suggestive and picturesque imagery. These characteristics of Tagore’s romantic poetry are beautifully but together in Gitanjali, which has a unique imaginative appeal which transcends the barriers of time and place.

A Passionate Love of Nature

Throughout his life Tagore exhibited a passionate love for nature. In his poetry too he appears as a great lover of Nature like Wordsworth, Robert Frost, Hindi Chhayavadi poets and many other poets of Bengal. As a lover of nature he is again a true romanticist. His attitude towards Nature is neither that of the child, nor that of the pessimist, nor that of an angry man. The sight of flowers, trees, honey bees, thorns, clouds, dark night, the songs of birds, the filling of the pitcher at the foundation, the fading flowers, “a glad bird on its flight across the sea,” and the colours, the sounds and the scents of nature fascinate him and intoxicate him with boundless joy.

Primarily and Pre-Eminently a Lyric Poet

Tagore wrote the largest number of lyrics ever attempted by any poet. His poems are offerings expressed in sweet and unique melodies, dazzling and imperishable in beauty. Gitanjali is a collection of hundred odd lyrics. The Gardener, The Lover’s Gift, The Fugitive and Other Poems, The Crescent Moon, The Poems of 1942 etc., are all collections of lyrics of exquisite beauty and superb harmony. Music and melody, cadences and rhythms, spontaneity and brevity are excellently blended together in his lyrics. The variety and suggestiveness of imagery in Tagore’s lyrics, mostly drawn from nature, is unsurpassable in the entire range of Indo-English poetry.

As a Poet of Love

Tagore is above all the poet of love. Love flows from his heart, mind and soul in continuous stream assuming all different forms in its winding from finite into infinite. He interprets love in all its multiform expressions-the love of mother, of son, of husband, wife, lover, of beloved and of friend. His poetry expresses his ardent love for someone whose identity remains a mystery. Was the person Nalini, the Maharashtrian girl, with whom as some say, he fell in love? Or was she Kadambari, his sister-in-law whom he adored and who inspired him to write? The Gardener, Fruit-Gathering and Lover’s Gift give expression to his feelings of love for the mortal beloved whereas Gitanjali is an expression of his love for the immortal one.

His Style, Diction and Imagery

There is a rare beauty of expression in the poems of Tagore. His choice of diction is very happy. He chooses highly suggestive, melodious and expressive words from a rich treasure. Only the inevitable words are used, which it is hard to improve upon. We cannot substitute even a single word because by doing so we will destroy the sense, spirit and intrinsic beauty of the poem. Imagination lends charm to his style. Imagination enables him to harmonise ideas among themselves and to communicate them in a beautiful, musical and rhythmic style.

Conclusion

Rabindranath Tagore is one of the greatest poets of the world. The most fundamental characteristics of his poetry-his sense of realism and his humanism have been brought out in the poems that he composed. He is a poet of universal religion, internationalism and world brotherhood. In a very real sense, he was a world poet.