The Gardener

The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Gardener, by Rabindranath
Tagore #9 in our series by Rabindranath Tagore
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Title: The Gardener
Author: Rabindranath Tagore
Release Date: October, 2004 [EBook #6686]
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Edition: 10
Language: English
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0. START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE
GARDENER ***
This eBook was produced by Chetan Jain.
THE GARDENER
[Frontispiece: Rabindranath Tagore. Age 16--see tagore.jpg]
THE GARDENER
By
Rabindranath Tagore
Translated by the author from the original Bengali
1915
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 in wondrous
designs.
QUEEN. What will you have for your reward?
SERVANT. To be allowed to hold your little fists like tender
lotus-buds and slip flower chains over your wrists; to tinge the soles of
your feet with the red juice of ashoka
petals and kiss away the speck
of dust that may chance to linger there.
QUEEN. Your prayers are granted, my servant, you will be the
gardener of my flower garden.

2
"Ah, poet, the evening draws near; your hair is turning grey. "Do you in
your lonely musing hear the message of the hereafter?"
"It is evening," the poet said, "and I am listening because some one
may call from the village, late though it be.
"I watch if young straying
hearts meet together, and two pairs of eager eyes beg for music to break
their silence and speak for them.
"Who is there to weave their
passionate songs, if I sit on the shore of life and contemplate death and
the beyond?
"The early evening star disappears.
"The glow of a funeral pyre
slowly dies by the silent river. "Jackals cry in chorus from the
courtyard of the deserted house in the light of the worn-out moon.
"If
some wanderer, leaving home, come here to watch the night and with
bowed head listen to the murmur of the darkness, who is there to
whisper the secrets of life into his ears if I,
shutting my doors, should
try to free myself from mortal bonds?
"It is a trifle that my hair is turning grey.
"I am ever as young or as
old as the youngest and the oldest of this village.
"Some have smiles,
sweet and simple, and some a sly twinkle in their eyes.
"Some have
tears that well up in the daylight,