Abroad.

The GARDENER

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.

Rabindranath Tagore

Freedom.

Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high;

Where knowledge is free;

Where the world has not been broken up into fragments by narrow domestic walls;

Where words come out from the depth of truth;

Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection;

Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way into the dreary desert sand of dead habit;

Where the mind is led forward by thee into ever-widening thought and action–

Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake.

Rabindranath Tagore

Resurrecting.

In my house, with Thine own hands,

Light the lamp of Thy love!

Thy transmuting lamp entrancing,

Wondrous are its rays.

Change my darkness to Thy light, Lord!

Change my darkness to Thy light.

And my evil into good.

Touch me but once and I will change,

All my clay into Thy gold

All the sense lamps that I did light

Sooted into worries

Sitting at the door of my soul,

Light Thy resurrecting lamp!

Rabindranath Tagore

Heart.

Let me not pray to be sheltered from dangers,

but to be fearless in facing them.

Let me not beg for the stilling of my pain, but

for the heart to conquer it.

Rabindranath Tagore

Another.

Eisenstaedt, Puppet Show, 1963

Don't limit a child to your own learning, for she was born in another time.

Rabindranath Tagore

Same.

The same stream of life that runs
through my veins night and day runs
through the world and dances in rhythmic measure.

It is the same life that shoots in joy
through the dust of the earth in numberless blades of grass and
breaks into tumultuous waves of leaves and flowers.

It is the same life that is rocked in the oceans-cradle
of birth and of death, In ebb and in flow

I feel my limbs are made glorious by the touch of this world
of life. And my pride is from the life-throb of ages
dancing in my blood this moment.

Rabindranath Tagore

Awake.

Where the mind is without fear

and the head is held high,

Where knowledge is free;

Where the world has not been broken

up into fragments by narrow domestic

walls;

Where words come out from the

depth of truth;

Where tireless striving

stretches its arms towards

perfection;

Where the clear stream of reason

has not lost its way into the

dreary desert sand of dead habit;

Where the mind is led forward

by thee into ever-widening

thought and action–

into that heaven of freedom,

my Father,

Let my country awake.

Rabindranath Tagore

Stumble.

The mind of the child is always on the alert, restless and eager to receive firsthand knowledge from mother nature. Children should be surrounded with the things of nature which have their own educational value. Their minds should be allowed to stumble upon and surprised at everything that happens in today’s life.

Rabindranath Tagore