The gardener
Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941), 1913
Fifty-odd small songs about love, parting, gardens and God, in the plain English prose the poet made himself, from the Bengali originals. These small songs move with a quiet, longing tenderness, mixing love and faith in plain, aphoristic prose that often sounds like prayer.
Feels like longing and tenderness. About love, faith and morality.
Who it’s for
You may like this if you enjoy lyrical poetry about love, parting and devotion, especially in short prose pieces. Be aware that Tagore's English keeps an old-fashioned, prayer-like diction, with words like 'thy' and 'ye', which can slow some readers.
Why read it
It offers brief, open-hearted songs that sit with love and faith without resolving them, a good companion when you want language that is simple and quietly searching.
Pages from the book
A man decides to leave his family for God, and God quietly objects.
At midnight the would-be ascetic announced:“This is the time to give up my home and seek for God. Ah, whohas held me so long in delusion here?”God whispered, “I,” but the ears of the man were stopped.With a baby asleep at her breast lay his wife, peacefullysleeping on one side of the bed.The man said, “Who are ye that have fooled me so long?”The voice said again, “They are God,” but he heard it not.The baby cried out in its dream, nestling close to its mother.God commanded, “Stop, fool, leave not thy home,” but still heheard not.God sighed and complained, “Why does my servant wander to seekme, forsaking me?” A writer addresses you directly, knowing he will never meet you.
Who are you, reader, reading my poems an hundred years hence?I cannot send you one single flower from this wealth of thespring, one single streak of gold from yonder clouds.Open your doors and look abroad.From your blossoming garden gather fragrant memories of thevanished flowers of an hundred years before.In the joy of your heart may you feel the living joy that sangone spring morning, sending its glad voice across an hundredyears. The tenderness you're proudest of may be the thing that smothers.
Why did the lamp go out?I shaded it with my cloak to save it from the wind, that is whythe lamp went out.Why did the flower fade?I pressed it to my heart with anxious love, that is why theflower faded.Why did the stream dry up?I put a dam across it to have it for my use, that is why thestream dried up. Rabindranath Tagore.Tagore made the English prose versions of The Gardener himself from his Bengali songs; the Nobel came in 1913, and he renounced his knighthood in 1919 after the Amritsar massacre.
Books that feel like this
Goblin Market, The Prince's Progress, and Other Poems
Christina Rossetti, 1862
Also longing and love.
More by Rabindranath Tagore
My Reminiscences
Rabindranath Tagore, 1912
A boy in a vast Calcutta house, a school he hated, a first snowfall, a mother's death: Tagore's own account of how a poet's mind is made.
Gitanjali
Rabindranath Tagore, 1910
Short devotional songs that read like love letters to something unnamed. A way to spend an hour with longing, humility and joy, in English prose the poet shaped himself.
Where to get it
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Questions readers ask
- Is The gardener for me?
- You may like this if you enjoy lyrical poetry about love, parting and devotion, especially in short prose pieces. Be aware that Tagore's English keeps an old-fashioned, prayer-like diction, with words like 'thy' and 'ye', which can slow some readers.
- What is The gardener like?
- These small songs move with a quiet, longing tenderness, mixing love and faith in plain, aphoristic prose that often sounds like prayer. Feels like longing and tenderness. About love, faith and morality.
- What should I read after The gardener?
- If you liked The gardener, try Sonnets from the Portuguese (Elizabeth Barrett Browning), The Lily of the Valley (Honoré de Balzac) and Goblin Market, The Prince's Progress, and Other Poems (Christina Rossetti).
A taste of the feed
What it costs to hand someone the ashes of your grief.
I lift my heavy heart up solemnly, As once Electra her sepulchral urn, And, looking in thine eyes, I overturn The ashes at thy feet. Behold and see What a great heap of grief lay hid in me, And how the red wild sparkles dimly burn Through the ashen greyness. If thy foot in scorn Could tread them out to darkness utterly, It might be well perhaps. But if instead Thou wait beside me for the wind to blow The grey dust up—those laurels on thine head, O my Beloved, will not shield thee so, That none of all the fires shall scorch and shred The hair beneath. Stand further off then! Go.
Sonnets from the Portuguese · Elizabeth Barrett Browning
The heaviest thing you will ever have to carry is yourself.
God strengthen me to bear myself; That heaviest weight of all to bear, Inalienable weight of care. All others are outside myself, I lock my door and bar them out The turmoil, tedium, gad-about. I lock my door upon myself, And bar them out; but who shall wall Self from myself, most loathed of all? If I could once lay down myself, And start self-purged upon the race That all must run! Death runs apace.
Goblin Market, The Prince's Progress, and Other Poems · Christina Rossetti
A wind that carries every love story ever told.
Always it brought softly to him strange, sweet tidings of far-off things. It blew from a place that was old and whispered of youth. It blew down the grooves of time. It brought a story of the passing hours. It breathed low of fighting men and praying women. It sang clearly the song of love. That ever was the burden of its tidings—youth in the shady woods, waders through the wet meadows, boy and girl at the hedgerow stile, bathers in the booming surf, sweet, idle hours on grassy, windy hills, long strolls down moonlit lanes—everywhere in far-off lands, fingers locked and bursting hearts and longing lips—from all the world tidings of unquenchable love.
Riders of the Purple Sage · Zane Grey
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