The Stream of Life
    The following excerpt from Rabindranath Tagore’s Gitanjali was sent to me by my friend Judy.  The Bengali poet published it in 1910.–April MooreÂ
The same stream of life that runs through my veins night and day runs through the world and dances
in rhythmic measures. It is the same life that shoots in joy through the dust of the earth in numberless blades of grass and breaks into tumultuous waves of leaves and flowers. It is the same life that is rocked in the ocean-cradle of birth and of death, in ebb and in flow. I feel my limbs are made glorious by the touch of this world of life. And my pride is from the life-throb of ages dancing in my blood this moment.
-Rabindranath Tagore
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November 14th, 2008 at 9:07 pm
Hi April,
Thank you for this piece. Poet, Musician,composer, Scholar, founded a school, Nobel Prize Winner 1913, and in our times I think we might call him an activist, Rabindranath Tagore has a poem in the Gitanjali which has been translated into Englishand speaks as well to us today as it did nearly 100 years ago.
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Mind Without Fear
Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high;
Where knowledge is free;
Where the world has not been broken up
into fragments by narrow domestic walls;
Where words come out from the depth of truth;
Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection;
Where the clear stream of reason
has not lost its way into the dreary desert sand of dead habit;
Where the mind is led forward by thee into ever-widening thought and action—
Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake.
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Those who wish can google to the Nobel site and refer to Tagore 1913 which gives a good summary of his life and work.
John
November 15th, 2008 at 7:12 am
Thank you so much, John, for sharing this poem by Tagore, and for giving us more information about him.