The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Gardener, by Rabindranath Tagore

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Title: The Gardener

Author: Rabindranath Tagore

Release Date: October, 2004 [EBook #6686]
Posting Date: June 5, 2009

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE GARDENER ***

Produced by Chetan Jain

THE GARDENER

By Rabindranath Tagore

Translated by the author from the original Bengali

1915

[Frontispiece: Rabindranath Tagore. Age 16--see tagore.jpg]

To W. B. Yeats

Thanks are due to the editor of _Poetry, a Magazine of Verse_, for
permission to reprint eight poems in this volume.

Preface

Most of the lyrics of love and life, the translations of which from
Bengali are published in this book, were written much earlier than the
series of religious poems contained in the book named _Gitanjali_. The
translations are not always literal--the originals being sometimes
abridged and sometimes paraphrased.

Rabindranath Tagore.

1

SERVANT. Have mercy upon your servant, my queen!

QUEEN. The assembly is over and my servants are all gone. Why
do you come at this late hour?

SERVANT. When you have finished with others, that is my time.
I come to ask what remains for your last servant to do.

QUEEN. What can you expect when it is too late?

SERVANT. Make me the gardener of your flower garden.

QUEEN. What folly is this?

SERVANT. I will give up my other work.
I will throw my swords and lances down in the dust. Do not send
me to distant courts; do not bid me undertake new conquests.
But make me the gardener of your flower garden.

QUEEN. What will your duties be?

SERVANT. The service of your idle days.
I will keep fresh the grassy path where you walk in the morning,
where your feet will be greeted with praise at every step by
the flowers eager for death.
I will swing you in a swing among the branches of the
_saptaparna_, where the early evening moon will struggle
to kiss your skirt through the leaves.
I will replenish with scented oil the lamp that burns by your
bedside, and decorate your footstool with sandal and saffron
paste