Read I Won't Let You Go Online
Authors: Rabindranath Tagore Ketaki Kushari Dyson
Yes, they call me a romantic.
And I accept it:
I am a traveller to delight’s sacred springs.
Love, I have indeed
dyed the shawl that wraps me.
When I come to your door,
I sing dawn’s Bhairab, invoke its furor.
I pluck the scent of spring
in tuberoses
and invade your lonely room’s gentle breezes.
Softly I read you poems
which are rhythmic.
The rhythms are interspersed
with structured statements artfully prepared.
When you hear such things,
the smile on your lips acquires a drunken tinge.
When I play Multan
on my flute,
my inner mystery finds its melodic route.
I place you at the centre of a sphere of fantasies,
carefully peeling off its dusty sheath:
myself I make that world.
I trick the Creator,
picking colours and flavours from His workshop,
nicking a touch of His magic.
Much of that is fantasy, I know;
much, indeed, is a shadow.
When you ask me – ‘Can this be realistic?’ –
I say, ‘Never, for I am a romantic!’
There it is – the realistic world;
I know too well how to get there
and get back.
I pay back what I owe it –
that’s not done in words, and I do know it –
I fully accept my liabilities.
There’s poverty there, and disease, and ugliness;
women there are placed under duress.
There I discard my shawl and don my armour,
for jobs must be done that know no mercy whatsoever.
Let drums give us courage where we must renounce and suffer:
never let me be an amateur realist out there.
There let beauty walk hand in hand
with the terrifying.
[1939? First published in the magazine
Kavita,
Poush 1346 (December–January 1939–40)]
Love came
with such quiet steps
I thought her a dream.
I didn’t ask her to sit down.
When she took her leave, no sooner had she opened the door
than I heard the sound.
I rushed out to call her back.
By then she was a bodiless dream
fading into the night’s dark,
in the far path her lamp-flame
a reddish mirage.
[Santiniketan, 28 March 1940]
When separation, I reckoned, was total,
I was walking all alone, without an aim,
Srabon clouds dark-leaning on the wood’s head,
keenest lightning cleaving apart night’s breast;
River Baruni’s liquid purr from afar. –
My mind kept saying: Impossible, it’s impossible!
On many such nights, her head against my arm,
she’d heard a poet’s own humming of kajari chants.
Trees thrilled by densest downpour’s drumming,
in flesh and spirit at one with one’s leman:
came such a night, with the same Srabon abundance. –
My mind kept saying: Impossible, it’s impossible!
On I drifted in the darkest deep of night,
the rain playing sky’s music on my veins.
A honey-whiff from a jasmine grove, wind-borne,
the tidings I used to get from chains on her braids:
it rose again, the fragrance of those flowers. –
My mind kept saying: Impossible, it’s impossible!
In a reverie, I wandered by thought’s error
to the window which had so often beckoned me.
I heard a sitar playing a musical air,
a song of mine, twined with a hint of tears.
You left the poet, but kept the poet’s honour. –
My mind kept saying: Impossible, it’s impossible!
[Santiniketan, 16 July 1940]
In the noontide between sleep and wake
perhaps in a dream I saw
the sheath of my being slip
and fall in the stream
of an unknown river,
carrying with it my name, my reputation,
all of a miser’s heap,
shameful memories signed by
delicious moments.
Glories and infamies
floated away on the waves,
couldn’t be brought back.
Then did I, ego-less, argue within myself:
of all my losses
which one hurt me the most?
It wasn’t my past, with which in joys and sorrows
my days and nights had passed.
It was my future,
which I’d never had,
in which my desires,
like seeds within the earth’s womb,
had, with their sprouting hopes,
dreamt through the long night
of the light that hadn’t arrived.
[Santiniketan, 24 November 1940]
When the god of death gave the command for annihilation,
men took on themselves the task of self-destruction.
Depressed, I’ve thought: why doesn’t a sudden disaster
hit this errant planet which has veered from its course,
so we all die together, in one big blazing pyre?
But then I reflect: if through suffering on suffering
sin hasn’t rotted, its seed will surely sleep
in the ashes of the holocaust, and on the breast
of a new creation
once more raise its thorns.
[Santiniketan, 5 December 1940]
Silently comes the fierce night, batters down
the sapped body’s enfeebled door-bolt,
enters within, commences to ravish
life’s glorious loveliness, till the mind,
under darkness’s attack, acknowledges it’s beaten.
When the shame of that defeat, that infirmity’s ignominy
have done their worst, suddenly upon the horizon
appears the day’s banner, drawn in golden rays,
and as if from some far centre of the firmament
arises a clamour – ‘Lies! All lies!’
In the morning’s serene light I see myself
as one who has conquered suffering, on the tower
of the exhausted body’s fortress.
[Santiniketan, 27 January 1941]
In creation’s vast field
the play of fireworks in the skies
with suns and stars
is on a cosmic scale.
I too came from the invisible without beginning
with a minute fire-particle to a tiny spot
of space and time.
Now as I enter the last act, the lamp’s flame
flickers, the shadows reveal
the illusory nature of this play.
Joys and sorrows, dramatic disguises,
slowly become slack.
Hundreds of actors and actresses through the ages
have left their many-coloured costumes outside the door
of the theatre. I look and see
in the greenroom of hundreds of extinguished stars
the king of the theatre standing still, alone.
[Santiniketan, 3 February 1941]
This life of mine’s been nurtured by a river.
In its arteries flow
the gifts of mountain-peaks.
Its fields have been shaped by many alluvial layers.
Mysterious vital juices from diverse sources
have spread themselves in harvests upon harvests.
From the east and the west networks of song-streams
lull its sleep and wake.
Ambassadress of the cosmos, that river,
she who brings the far near, bids us greet
the unknown at our doorsteps, – it was she
who wove the day of my birth. And for ever
on her streams, untied, my mobile home
drifts from bank to bank.
I am an outcast. I am a vagabond.
Boundless bounty piles my birthday plate
again and again with food, making no bones about it.
[Santiniketan, 23 February 1941]