Darkly you sweep on, Eternal Fugitive, round whose bodiless rush stagnant space frets into eddying bubbles of light. Is your heart lost to the Lover calling you across his immeasurable loneliness? Is the aching urgency of your haste the sole reason why your tangled tresses break into stormy riot and pearls of fire roll along your path as from a broken necklace? Your fleeting steps kiss the dust of this... more...

I Bid me and I shall gather my fruits to bring them in full baskets into your courtyard, though some are lost and some not ripe. For the season grows heavy with its fulness, and there is a plaintive shepherd's pipe in the shade. Bid me and I shall set sail on the river. The March wind is fretful, fretting the languid waves into murmurs. The garden has yielded its all, and in the weary hour of... more...

I am glad to have this opportunity once more of speaking to you before I leave Japan. My stay here has been so short that one may think I have not earned my right to speak to you about anything concerning your country. I feel sure that I shall be told, that I am idealising certain aspects, while leaving others unnoticed, and that there are chances of my disillusionment, if I remain here for long. For I... more...

INTRODUCTION A few days ago I said to a distinguished Bengali doctor of medicine, 'I know no German, yet if a translation of a German poet had moved me, I would go to the British Museum and find books in English that would tell me something of his life, and of the history of his thought. But though these prose translations from Rabindranath Tagore have stirred my blood as nothing has for years, I... more...