Wednesday April 2 — Rabindranath Tagore Gitanjali # 63
Tagore’s No. 63 — someone in a time of change, tempted to lose heart. The poet’s responds, pauses one moment and remembers the wonder of her/his life and the wonder of the Sacred One whom Tagore addresses as “Thee” and “Thou.’
Walking campus yesterday I saw lots of playfulness, strangers smiling and saying hi and praising the day’s windy and spectaculor colors. It felt like the campus was tasting some beginning healing after this relentless winter. Perhaps that’s what led me back to Tagore and # 63.
Have a good day. 46º and sunny at game time; aiming at mid-50ies by 5:00. Residual snow keeps quietly melting.
john sj
Thou hast made me known to friends whom I knew not.
Thou hast given me seats in homes not my own.
Thou hast brought the distant near and made a brother of the stranger.
I am uneasy at heart when I have to leave my accustomed shelter;
I forget that there abides the old in the new,
and that there also thou abidest.
Through birth and death, in this world or in others,
wherever thou leadest me it is thou, the same,
the one companion of my endless life
who ever linkest my heart with bonds of joy to the unfamiliar.
When one knows thee, then alien there is none,
then no door is shut.
Oh, grant me my prayer
that I may never lose the bliss of the touch of the one
in the play of the many.
Tagore Gitanjali #63
Tagore died in the city of his birth, Calcutta, in 1941. He vastly influenced poetry, sacred and secular, not only in India but around the world. He is the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1913. If you buy Gitanjali, a book of 100 short sacred poems, prepare yourself to only read one poem at a time so you can sit with it. Here is # 1. These poems have no titles, only numbers.
Tagore on his 70th birthday, May 2931