Stray Birds

'Stray birds of summer come to my window to sing and fly away.' This book gathers 326 very short poems and sayings, many only one or two lines long, in which Rabindranath Tagore captures a single thought or image: 'Let life be beautiful like summer flowers and death like autumn leaves'; 'The butterfly counts not months but moments, and has time enough'; 'Clouds come floating into my life, no longer to carry rain or usher storm, but to add colour to my sunset sky.'

Published in 1916, the collection was inspired partly by the Japanese haiku that Tagore encountered on his visit to Japan that year, and partly by Indian traditions of aphorism. This edition has illustrations by Willy Pogány. Compare The Gardener and The Crescent Moon.

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.