Romantic Songs of Tagore

About Romantic Songs of Tagore

This is a selection of one hundred lyrics of Tagore – Freely translated in full rhyme and keeping intact the poet’s original metrical pattern as far as possible – from his songs’ omnibus Geeta Bitan, tri-lingual in Bengali, Hindi and English scripts. Quite often the duality of divinity and humanity is quite blurred in his love songs. (as indeed in his mystic songs as well). In the beginning his lyrics throbbed with inexplicable longings and unfulfilled desires, much akin in spirit to the Persian Ghazals of unrequited passion of the fourteenth-eighteenth century. Gradually, the poet transited from sensual love to the extra-sensual realm. Instead of beauty, he longed for the form beyond the sensual. In the middle years in age. The poet perceived love’s tryst as not waiting in a room’s corner, but launching a sojourn with the flute playing its melody of ‘hard sorrow and deep joy’. Ultimately, the poet found a stilled state beyond pain and enjoyment, focused in the light of an impending death.