The Crescent Moon

In these prose poems Rabindranath Tagore enters the world of childhood: a baby who could fly up to heaven if he wished but stays for his mother's love; a boy who dreams of being a sailor, or a hero rescuing his mother from robbers, or a champa flower playing hide-and-seek with her; questions about where babies come from; paper boats floated down the stream; and a mother's tender, sometimes sad thoughts as she watches her child grow.

Tagore translated the poems from Bengali himself, and the book was published in 1913, the year of his Nobel Prize. Simple and luminous, it is often read by parents and children together. Read also The Gardener and Gitanjali, and see Tagore's essays in Sadhana.

Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941) was born in Calcutta, the youngest son of a great Bengali family of reformers and artists. He wrote poems, stories, novels, plays and some two thousand songs, and his songs became the national anthems of both India and Bangladesh.

He founded a school in the countryside at Santiniketan, which grew into a university, and in 1913 became the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize, for Gitanjali. In 1919 he returned his British knighthood in protest at the massacre at Amritsar. The Home and the World and The Post Office show his range.