Scan barcode
A review by trsr
The Gardener by Rabindranath Tagore
4.0
How wonderful and strange to read Tagore in 2013, a full hundred years since his receiving the Nobel Prize in literature. [b:The Gardener|166346|The Gardener|Rabindranath Tagore|http://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/books/1367193168s/166346.jpg|784925] is wonderful because Tagore's poetry, ranging from rumination to rhapsody, mixes rural settings and nature so evocatively with his internal world of thoughts and feelings. I particularly liked a few verses on the ephemeral nature of beauty and loss, on growing old, on the connection between human and animal beings, and on what the Earth provides. And reading [b:The Gardener|166346|The Gardener|Rabindranath Tagore|http://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/books/1367193168s/166346.jpg|784925] a 100 years later is strange because of what he writes in his final stanza:
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.
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.