Listen, can you hear it? (from The Lover of God)
by Rabindranath Tagore
English version by Tony Stewart and Chase Twitchell
Listen, can you hear it?
His bamboo flute speaks
the pure language of love.
The moon enlightens the trees,
the path, the sinuous Yamuna.
Oblivious of the jasmine’s scent
I stagger around,
disheveled heart bereft of modesty,
eyes wet with nerves and delight.
Tell me, dear friend, say it aloud:
is he not my own Dark Lord Syama?
Is it not my name his flute pours
into the empty evening?
For eons I longed for God,
I yearned to know him.
That’s why he has come to me now,
deep emerald Lord of my breath.
O Syama, whenever your faraway flute thrills
through the dark, I say your name,
only your name, and will my body to dissolve
in the luminous Yamuna.
Go to her, Lord, go now.
What’s stopping you?
The earth drowns in sleep.
Let’s go. I’ll walk with you.
— from The Lover of God, by Rabindranath Tagore / Translated by Tony Stewart
/ Image by Rajesh Nagulakond /
There is a fascinating story behind this poem and the other poems of Tagore’s The Lover of God… In the late 19th century, a respected Bengali journal published a newly discovered collection poems by a previously unknown 17th century poet, Bhanusimha, or Sun Lion. The critics celebrated these newly unearthed bhakti masterpieces.
The problem was that Bhanusimha never actually existed. Bhanisimha was the pseudonym used by a brilliant 14-year-old boy — the young Rabindranath Tagore.
He of course matured into one of the greatest poets of modern India.
Tagore continued to edit and refine these poems over his lifetime, leaving us with a collection of modern bhakti masterpieces.
Just a few notes about this selection:
As with many bhakti poems, this is, on the surface, a poem of love and longing. Radha pines for her beloved, Krishna. But these are usually understood to reflect deeper truths. It’s always fascinating the response I notice when I recite a bhakti poem aloud — with emotion, with passion, but also with a sense of the deep spiritual longing that imbues the phrases. It evokes a direct, intimate form of worship and connection to the Divine.
Radha (the poem’s speaker) is the soul, the lover of God, the spiritual seeker. Krishna (Syama) is God, the Beloved.
Krishna plays a flute, an enchanting melody that calls all souls to himself. The sound of his flute is the hum that underlies all creation, the soft sound heard in the silence of meditation.
His beauty is often compared with the moon. This moon is also the luminescence of enlightenment.
The Yamuna is one of the great rivers of India, feeding into the mighty Ganges, but she is also a goddess who fell in love with Krishna. So the reference to the sinuous Yamuna is meant to evoke both an erotic femininity and also emphasize that love for Krishna. To dissolve in the Yamuna is to disappear into eternal love for God/Krishna.
The final verse switches from Radha’s voice to the poet’s, encouraging Krishna to respond to the longing of the soul. Something quite playful in that…
Go to her, Lord, go now.
What’s stopping you?
The earth drowns in sleep.
Let’s go. I’ll walk with you.
Recommended Books: Rabindranath Tagore
Rabindranath Tagore wrote the national anthems of two countries, founded a university, and in 1913 became the first non-European to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature. It is easy to let all of that stand in front of the poems. But the work readers actually love him for — the Gitanjali songs above all — came out of something much quieter: a dawn on a Calcutta veranda when he was twenty-one, when the world briefly came unveiled, and then a lifetime of learning how to live in the light of what he had seen. He spent that life refusing to keep God in a temple. He looked instead in the river, in the human face, in the man breaking stones by the roadside.
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— from Perfume of the Desert: Inspirations from Sufi Wisdom, by Andrew Harvey / Eryk Hanut
