Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941)

I’ve not read much poetry, and I consider myself an atheist for now. These two things, however, did not make my experience of reading Gitanjali any less marvellous.
Tagore is the only person to have contributed to the national anthems of two countries, but he’s also equally known for being the (then) first non-European to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. When I lived in Muscat, ~2005, we had ‘Into That Heaven of Freedom’ as a school hymn, and I always looked forward to singing that – but seventeen years later, the sonnet I revisited in this collection has not diminished a bit for me.
Tagore finds joy in the divine, death, life, and everything in between – to the extent you wonder if he was ever sad, even for a moment. His life seems filled with bystanders who laugh at him for believing in the divine to this extent, but he can’t be bothered to care about trivial things, such as his reputation regarding the all-powerful. His sense of self is nothing compared to God’s benevolence, and his yearning to merge with God is all there is. Tagore finds God everywhere – the rivers, the seasons, the chirping of birds, the night and the day, and even a street procession. There are also beautiful pieces about the soul, the country and his belief that he loves death as much as life because death is simply an occasion to cast aside all superficiality and merge with God.
The best thing about Gitanjali is the sense of wonderment you feel throughout the poems. Yeats’ translation of the work must have cut most of the marvel in Bengali, yet beauty still radiates from the prose to the extent I was left spellbound.… (more)