Gitanjali (Song Offerings)

[...they do not rule] over a life without meaning—which is all some people can ever know of life—nor are they merely carried around by university students only to be set aside once their professional lives begin. Instead, as the generations pass, travelers will hum them on the highway and men will sing them while rowing upon the rivers. Lovers, as they wait for one another, will find that murmuring these poems turns the love of God into a magical space where their own more painful passions can be refreshed and restored. At every moment, the heart of this poet reaches out to these people without any sense of derogation The act of treating someone as being of little worth; looking down on others. or condescension, for he knows that they will understand him; he has filled his work with the actual details of their daily lives.

The traveler in the red-brown clothes (worn so that the dust will not show), the girl searching her bed for petals fallen from her royal lover's wreath, and the servant or the bride awaiting the master’s homecoming in the empty house—all of these are images of the human heart turning toward God. Flowers and rivers, the blowing of conch shells Large seashells used as trumpets in Hindu religious rituals and daily prayer., the heavy monsoon rains of the Indian July, or the parching heat—all are images of the moods of the heart as it experiences union with or separation from the Divine. Even a man sitting in a boat upon a river playing a lute—looking like one of those figures full of mysterious meaning in a Chinese painting—represents God Himself.

A whole people and a whole civilization, which might seem incredibly strange to us, appears to have been captured by this poet's imagination. And yet, we are moved not because of this strangeness, but because we have met our own image in his work, as though we had walked in [on our own souls...]