Rabindranath Tagore: Gitanjali & The Gardener

GITANJALI Rabindranath Tagore's a Bengali polymath, reshaped Bengali literature and music, and Indian art with contextual modernism in the late 19th and early 20th century. He was the first European to win the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913.

Gitanjali includes a large collection of poems or song lyrics that are related to religion, while in The Gardener presented poems are love and talk about love and life. These books have been translated from Bengali to English, the translation is not always literal, some of the original verses are redundant, and the content of some of them is paraphrased.

Against the backdrop of life in Bengal region, these short love poems penetrate the most - cherished places in the soul of every man, and give a sense of feelings that we experienced, but we never managed to express. That is why it is worth to read these verses.

The comparison between the two books is clear - from sensual love poems of The Gardener, to prayers in Gitanjali. Some of the poems include topics related to nature, but here the spiritual present, albeit subtly, from pastoral to the divine. The verses are considered songs of devotion, of love, of that passion that leads us to describe my feelings, and that can only be described in one - single verse.

Both books have a deep human sense - the ability to feel love and favor of God toward us, while praying or reading any of the prayers of Gitanjali, or the ability to express your feelings to a loved one for us thanks to the poems in The Gardener.

Light, my light, the world-filling light, the eye-kissing light, heart-sweetening light! Ah, the light dances, my darling, at the centre of my life; the light strikes, my darling, the chords of my love; the sky opens, the wind runs wild, laughter passes over the earth. The butterflies spread their sails on the sea of light. Lilies and jasmines surge up on the crest of the waves of light. The light is shattered into gold on every cloud, my darling, and it scatters gems in profusion. Mirth spreads from leaf to leaf, my darling, and gladness without measure. The heaven's river has drowned its banks and the flood of joy is abroad. THE GARDENER Who are you, reader, reading my poems an hundred years hence? I cannot send you one single flower from this wealth of the spring, one single streak of gold from yonder clouds. Open your doors and look abroad. From your blossoming garden gather fragrant memories of the vanished flowers of an hundred years before. In the joy of your heart may you feel the living joy that sang one spring morning, sending its glad voice across an hundred years.