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Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941)
II
Keep me fully glad with nothing. Only take my
hand in your hand.
In the gloom of the deepening night take up my
heart and play with it as you list. Bind me close to you
with nothing.
I will spread myself out at your feet and lie still.
Under this clouded sky I will meet silence with silence.
I will become one with the night clasping the earth in
my breast.
Make my life glad with nothing.
The rains sweep the sky from end to end. Jasmines
in the wet untamable wind revel in their own perfume.
The cloud-hidden stars thrill in secret. Let me fill to
the full my heart with nothing but my own depth of joy.
The above poem was the second of fourteen by Tagore in the June 1913 issue of Poetry magazine. Tagore won the 1913 Nobel Prize for Literature, "because of his profoundly sensitive, fresh and beautiful verse, by which, with consummate skill, he has made his poetic thought, expressed in his own English words, a part of the literature of the West".
Tagore, Rabindranath. (1913, June). Poetry, 2 (3), 81-82.
Nobel Media AB. (2014). The Nobel Prize in Literature 1913. Retrieved from www.nobelprize.org/nobel_organizations/nobelmedia/nobelprize_org/.
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