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  • Song 36 From Gitanjali: - Rabindranath Tagore

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    Padmashree rao
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    Tagore's Song 36 is a prayer asking God for strength in five areas: 1) to bear life's joys and sorrows lightly and not be attached to them, 2) to successfully serve others, 3) to treat both poor and rich with equal dignity, 4) to rise above petty daily concerns, and 5) to surrender his own will and strength to God's will out of love. The poem expresses Tagore's beliefs in humility, serving those less fortunate, and surrendering oneself to God in order to achieve spiritual balance and freedom to help others.

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    Song 36 from Gitanjali

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    Tagore's Song 36 is a prayer asking God for strength in five areas: 1) to bear life's joys and sorrows lightly and not be attached to them, 2) to successfully serve others, 3) to treat both poor and rich with equal dignity, 4) to rise above petty daily concerns, and 5) to surrender his own will and strength to God's will out of love. The poem expresses Tagore's beliefs in humility, serving those less fortunate, and surrendering oneself to God in order to achieve spiritual balance and freedom to help others.

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    11K views2 pages

    Song 36 From Gitanjali: - Rabindranath Tagore

    Uploaded by

    Padmashree rao
    Tagore's Song 36 is a prayer asking God for strength in five areas: 1) to bear life's joys and sorrows lightly and not be attached to them, 2) to successfully serve others, 3) to treat both poor and rich with equal dignity, 4) to rise above petty daily concerns, and 5) to surrender his own will and strength to God's will out of love. The poem expresses Tagore's beliefs in humility, serving those less fortunate, and surrendering oneself to God in order to achieve spiritual balance and freedom to help others.

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Flag for inappropriate content
    Download as docx, pdf, or txt
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    Song 36 from Gitanjali

    -Rabindranath Tagore
    Rabindranath’s Gitanjali is originally written in Bengali language. The
    English Gitanjali or Song Offerings is a collection of 103 English poems
    of Tagore’s own English translations. The word Gitanjali is composed out
    of Gitanjali. Git means song, and anjali means offering, thus it’s meant
    as “Song offerings”. The publication of the English version of Gitanjali
    paved Tagore a way to the world of English literature. It was in 1912 he
    published the Gitanjali and in 1913 he was awarded the Nobel Prize by
    Swedish academy.

    Tagore's Song 36 is a prayer to God expressing how the speaker wishes


    to live. He prays for strength in five areas. First, he asks God for the
    ability to "lightly bear," or be detached from, both his joys or sorrows so
    that he can see them as transitory and unimportant. Second, he wishes
    to be able to serve others successfully. Third, he asks for the strength to
    treat poor and rich with equal dignity, neither scorning the poor nor
    grovelling before the mighty. A fourth request is that he can raise his
    mind above petty daily matters that are ultimately unimportant. Finally,
    he wants to give up his "strength" to God's will in a spirit of love.

    Tagore shows through this work his belief in the central importance of
    humility, dignity, and service to those less fortunate as the keys to
    spiritual balance. By not focusing too much on himself, the speaker
    hopes to be freed to help others and love God.

    In the poem, Tagore describes the cry of every penitent. The song is a
    prayer to transcend the earthly soul through a wholehearted surrender to
    God.

    He prays that God will strike at the root of "penury" in his heart. This
    "penury," or spiritual poverty, originates from the elevation of Self.
    Tagore continues his song by praying for strength. This strength is, of
    course, of a divine nature. Tagore suggests that the prayer for strength
    is essentially a prayer to annihilate the carnal nature of the Self. Tagore
    has used metaphorical language. He has created the image of
    a woodcutter striking hard at the root of a tree in order to uproot
    it. The tree in this poem is the tree of penury or great spiritual
    poverty.
    He prays for strength to bear the joys and sorrows of life equally and for
    the strength to manifest his love for God in fruitful service. Tagore also
    prays for strength to never ignore the plight of the needy. Interestingly,
    he also prays for strength never to bow before "insolent might." In other
    words, Tagore wants God to give him the courage to stand up against
    those who would oppress the poor and disenfranchised.

    Next, Tagore prays for strength to rise above "daily trifles" or the material
    considerations of life. He considers the intricacies of daily living to be a
    pettiness, compared to the wholehearted worship of God. Lastly, Tagore
    prays for strength to surrender his intensely carnal nature to God; he
    desires that his will be subsumed by God's will.

    In Song 36, Tagore makes the point that man cannot love God without a
    wholesale surrender of all his earthly desires, even natural ones such as
    the desire for free will. A devotee of God can only realize contentment
    when his love for God is all-absorbing. So, complete self-surrender to
    God is always manifest in service to others, hence the prayer to be
    "fruitful in service" and to "never . . . disown the poor."  
    He ends this song with a paradoxically – he prays for the strength in
    order to surrender his own strength before God’s will and that too with
    love.

    ***********

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