The Gardener

These eighty-five short poems of love and life, which Rabindranath Tagore translated into English prose himself, are lighter and more earthly than the devotional songs of Gitanjali: a servant asks his queen for nothing but to be the gardener of her flower garden, lovers meet at the riverside and the village well, a girl hesitates at her door, and the poet reflects on youth, longing, parting and the passing of time.

Tagore (1861–1941), the Bengali poet, composer and educator who became the first non-European winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1913, published The Gardener that year, explaining that most of its lyrics had been written much earlier than those of Gitanjali. Worth reading alongside it: The Crescent Moon and Stray Birds, and his 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.