Gitanjali | Page 3

will understand; and it has
filled itself with the circumstance of their lives. The traveller in the
read-brown clothes that he wears that dust may not show upon him, the
girl searching in her bed for the petals fallen from the wreath of her
royal lover, the servant or the bride awaiting the master's home-coming
in the empty house, are images of the heart turning to God. Flowers and
rivers, the blowing of conch shells, the heavy rain of the Indian July, or
the moods of that heart in union or in separation; and a man sitting in a
boat upon a river playing lute, like one of those figures full of
mysterious meaning in a Chinese picture, is God Himself. A whole
people, a whole civilization, immeasurably strange to us, seems to have

been taken up into this imagination; and yet we are not moved because
of its strangeness, but because we have met our own image, as though
we had walked in Rossetti's willow wood, or heard, perhaps for the first
time in literature, our voice as in a dream.
Since the Renaissance the writing of European saints--however familiar
their metaphor and the general structure of their
thought--has ceased
to hold our attention. We know that we must at last forsake the world,
and we are accustomed in moments of weariness or exaltation to
consider a voluntary forsaking; but how can we, who have read so
much poetry, seen so many paintings, listened to so much music, where
the cry of the flesh and the cry of the soul seems one, forsake it harshly
and rudely? What have we in common with St. Bernard covering his
eyes that they may not dwell upon the beauty of the lakes of
Switzerland, or with the violent rhetoric of the Book of Revelations?
We would, if we might, find, as in this book, words full of courtesy. 'I
have got my leave. Bid me farewell, my brothers! I bow to you all and
take my departure. Here I give back the keys of my door--and I give up
all claims to my house. I only ask for last kind words from you. We
were neighbours for long, but I received more than I could give. Now
the day has dawned and the lamp that lit my dark corner is out. A
summons has come and I am ready for my journey.' And it is our own
mood, when it is furthest from 'a Kempis or John of the Cross, that
cries, 'And because I love this life, I know I shall love death as well.'
Yet it is not only in our thoughts of the parting that this book fathoms
all. We had not known that we loved God, hardly it may be that we
believed in Him; yet looking backward upon our life we discover, in
our exploration of the pathways of woods, in our delight in the lonely
places of hills, in that mysterious claim that we have made,
unavailingly on the woman that we have loved, the emotion that
created this insidious sweetness. 'Entering my heart
unbidden even as
one of the common crowd, unknown to me, my king, thou didst press
the signet of eternity upon many a fleeting moment.' This is no longer
the sanctity of the cell and of the scourge; being but a lifting up, as it
were, into a greater intensity of the mood of the painter, painting the
dust and the sunlight, and we go for a like voice to St. Francis and to

William Blake who have seemed so alien in our violent history.

We write long books where no page perhaps has any quality to make
writing a pleasure, being confident in some general design, just as we
fight and make money and fill our heads with politics--all dull things in
the doing--while Mr. Tagore, like the Indian civilization itself, has been
content to discover the soul and surrender himself to its spontaneity. He
often seems to contrast life with that of those who have loved more
after our fashion, and have more seeming weight in the world, and
always humbly as though he were only sure his way is best for him:
'Men going home glance at me and smile and fill me with shame. I sit
like a beggar maid, drawing my skirt over my face, and when they ask
me, what it is I want, I drop my eyes and answer them not.' At another
time, remembering how his life had once a different shape, he will say,
'Many an hour I have spent in the strife of the good and the evil, but
now it is the pleasure of my playmate of the empty days to draw my
heart on to him; and I know not why this sudden call to