Gitanjali (Song Offerings)

Summary

Gitanjali, meaning Song Offerings, is a collection of 103 prose poems that Rabindranath Tagore translated into English himself from his Bengali poems, chiefly from the Bengali Gitanjali of 1910. The English book was published in London in 1912 with an introduction by the Irish poet W. B. Yeats, and in 1913 Tagore became the first non-European to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature, largely on the strength of it. The poems are addressed to God, called the Lord, the Master, the Friend or simply thou, in an intimate, quiet voice. The speaker describes himself as a flute through which God plays, or a vessel God fills again and again; he waits for the divine guest, sings in the evening, and longs to meet God in daily life. Several poems reject religion that withdraws from the world. In one, the speaker tells a worshipper to stop chanting and telling beads in a shut temple, because God is out where the tiller tills the hard ground and the path-maker breaks stones. Others express humility, the joy of nature, the patience of love and the beauty of simple things such as rain, children playing on the seashore, flowers and the passing of the seasons. Some poems turn to death, which the speaker welcomes as a guest or a bridegroom, and to the final journey home. The best-known poem, number 35, is a prayer for his country: that it may awake into a heaven of freedom where the mind is without fear, knowledge is free, and the clear stream of reason has not lost its way. The book's music, simplicity and spiritual depth made it famous in Europe and America; for many readers it was the first introduction to Indian devotional poetry. Yeats's introduction praises the poems as the work of a supreme culture that still seems as natural as grass and rushes. The collection remains widely read in schools, especially poem 35, and invites comparison with the Psalms and other devotional writing.

Top Lessons

• Devotion

  The poems speak to God with intimacy and humility.

• Religion in daily life

  Poem 11 finds God among laborers rather than in a closed temple.

• Freedom

  Poem 35 imagines a nation of free minds and truthful words.

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