The poems of Rabindranath Tagore (1861 1941) are among the most haunting and tender in Indian and in world literature, expressing a profound and passionate human yearning. His ceaselessly inventive works deal with such subjects as the interplay between God and the world, the eternal and transient, and with the paradox of an endlessly changing universe that is in tune with unchanging harmonies. Poems such as Earth' and In the Eyes of a Peacock' present a picture of natural processes unaffected by human concerns, while others, as in Recovery 14', convey the poet's bewilderment about his place in the world. And exuberant works such as New Rain' and Grandfather's Holiday' describe Tagore's sheer joy at the glories of nature or simply in watching a grandchild play.

Author Biography

Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941)a Bengali poet, Brahmo Samaj philosopher, visual artist, playwright, novelist, and composer whose works reshaped Bengali literature and music in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. A cultural icon of Bengal and India, he became Asia's first Nobel laureate when he won the 1913 Nobel Prize in Literature. William Radice was born in 1951 in London. He is a poet and a scholar and translator of Bengali, and has written or edited nearly thirty books. He has also translated Tagore's short stories and his novel, The Home and the World, for Penguin.