All These I Loved: English Translation
All these I loved
This dancing of the light on the leaves
This playing of the wild winds
Among the sal groves
They have all maddened my mind
Along this red-earth road
That man going to the village market
The little girl sitting on the dust
Playing alone with her tray of toys
Whatever I see before me
They all make music in my eyes.
Mine is only a bamboo flute
And I play only rustic tunes
An earthly bond of this dusty earth
Has bound my mind
I have borrowed my view
From the views of those boys
I have set my tunes
To the tunes of those boys
Who have drunk the lights
Flowing from the blue of the skies.
Whenever I want to go to a far away place
They crowd around me to dissuade
The village sky waving rustic flowers
Beckons me back
I am yet to exhaust whatever is near
And whatever is sweet
So I don’t hanker after
Whatever is far
All these titbits
I am yet to find
Their farthest limits
I am yet to finish my songs
Of these ordinary things.
So wherever I go
This only I sing
How much they have pleased
How they have held me in a spell
Day and night I have no time
To do anything else
My eyes are drowned
Drowned is my mind
Don’t call me
It’s of no use –
Let others aim something big
Let them gather more and more
Let me rove
Let me sing
I don’t want to be someone big.
Rabindranath Tagore
Rabindranath Tagore (born May 7, 1861, Calcutta [now Kolkata], India—died August 7, 1941, Calcutta) Bengali poet, short-story writer, song composer, playwright, essayist, and painter who introduced new prose and verse forms and the use of colloquial language into Bengali literature, thereby freeing it from traditional models based on classical Sanskrit. He was highly influential in introducing Indian culture to the West and vice versa, and he is generally regarded as the outstanding creative artist of early 20th-century India. In 1913 he became the first non-European to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature.