The Gardener (LXXXV) -- Rabindranath Tagore

Guest poem sent in by Sashidhar Dandamudi

(Poem #1231) The Gardener (LXXXV) 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 a hundred years. -- Rabindranath Tagore

The recent poem by Flecker [Poem #1225] immediately triggered my memory of
this poem, that ends Tagore's "The Gardener". Although the time span across
which he was adressing "you" is only a century instead of a millenium, it
remains IMHO, a great ending for a book of poems. Also since we seem to be
reading a series of poems with the theme, "Spring", this fits right there
with the rest of them.

As an interesting aside, Tagore expanded on this theme in a seperate poem
called "The Year 1400" (the year 1400 (1996) refers to the Bengali
calender), in a poem he wrote in 1896. I was told by a friend from
Bangladesh that this poem was widely circulated and celebrated in 1996.  I
have had this poem read to me in Bengali but since I couldn't find a good
enough translation that does justice to the original, I couldn't submit that
to run it on the list. However for the curious here is a translation:

http://www.parabaas.com/rabindranath/articles/kKetaki1.html

Sashi