VARNAMALA 

Gangotri

Rabindranath Tagore

 

In My Sky At Twilight
 
 

In my sky at twilight you are like a cloud
and your form and color are the way I love them.
You are mine, mine, woman with sweet lips
and in your life my infinite dreams live.

The lamp of my soul dyes your feet,
My sour wine is sweeter on your lips,
oh reaper of my evening song,
how solitary dreams believe you to be mine.

You are mine, mine, I go shouting it to the
afternoon's wind,
and the wind hauls on my widowed voice.
Huntress of the depths of my eyes, your plunder
stills your nocturnal regard as though it were water.

You are taken in the net of my music, my love,
and my nets of music are wide as the sky.
My soul is born on the shore of your eyes of mourning.
In your eyes of mourning the land of dreams begins.
 

Poems from Gitanjali
 

Where the mind is without fear...
 

Where the mind is without fear
and the head is held high
Where knowledge is free
Where the world has not been broken up into fragments
By narrow domestic walls
Where words come out from the depth of truth
Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection 
Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way
Into the dreary desert sand of dead habit
Where the mind is led forward by thee
Into ever-widening thought and action
Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake
 
 

The song that I came to sing remains unsung to this day...
 

The song that I came to sing remains unsung to this day.
I have spent many days stringing and unstringing this my instrument.
The time has not come true, the words have not been rightly set; 
only there is the agony of wishing in my heart.
The blossom has not opened; only the wind is sighing by.
I have not seen his face, nor have I listened to his voice; only I have heard 
his gentle footsteps from the road before my house.
The livelong day has passes in spreading his seat on the floor; 
but the lamp has not been lit and I cannot ask him into my house.
I live in the hope of meeting with him; but this meeting is not yet.
 
 

Thou hast made me endless, such is thy pleasure...
 

Thou hast made me endless, such is thy pleasure.
This frail vessel thou emptiest again and again,
and fillest it ever with fresh life.

This little flute of a reed thou hast carried over hills and dales,
and hast breathed through it melodies eternally new.

At the immortal touch of thy hands
my little heart loses its limits in joy
and gives birth to utterance ineffable.

Thy infinite gifts come to me only on these very small hands of mine.
Ages pass, and still thou pourest, and still there is room to fill.
 
 

The same stream of life that runs through my veins night and day...
 

The same stream of life that runs through my veins night and day
runs through the world and dances in rhythmic measures.

It is the same life that shoots in joy
through the dust of the earth in numberless blades of grass
and breaks into tumultuous waves of leaves and flowers.

It is the same life that is rocked
in the ocean-cradle of birth and of death in ebb and in flow.

I feel my limbs are made glorious by the touch of this world of life
and my pride is from the life-throb of ages dancing in my  blood this moment.