Gitanjali

About the book

In these short prose translations of his own Bengali poems, Rabindranath Tagore gives spiritual longing the language of everyday encounters. Songs, boats, roads, flowers, labor, and the changing light become ways of imagining the relationship between a finite speaker and a divine presence. The voice moves through waiting, gratitude, fear, pride, surrender, and the desire to meet what seems both near and beyond reach. Devotion repeatedly returns to participation in the world rather than withdrawal from it, making ordinary work and human fellowship part of the poems' spiritual concern. W. B. Yeats's introduction frames this English collection, while the numbered pieces invite slow, separate readings as readily as a continuous passage through their recurring images.

• Devotion
• Everyday spirituality
• Mortality

Why read it

Read it for spiritual poetry whose most expansive questions arrive through concrete, familiar images.

Author's English prose translations; introduction by W. B. Yeats