 Here's an excerpt of what WB Yeats has to say about Rabindranath Tagore. I have carried the manuscripts of these translations about with me for days, reading it in railway trains or on the top of omnibuses and in restaurants, and I have often had to close it lest some stranger would see how much it moved me. These lyrics, which are in the original, my Indians tell me, full of subtlety, of rhythm, of untranslatable delicacies of color, of metrical invention, display in their thought a world I have dreamed of all my life long, the work of a supreme culture. They yet appear as much the growth of the common soil as the grass and the rushes, a tradition where poetry and religion are the same thing has passed through the centuries, gathering from learned and unlearned metaphor and emotion and carried back again to the multitude the thought of the scholar and of the noble. If the civilization of Bengal remains unbroken, if that common mind which, as one divines, runs through all is not, as with us, broken into a dozen minds that know nothing of each other, something even of what is most subtle in these verses will have come in a few generations to the beggar on the roads. When there was but one mind in England, Chaucer wrote his Tualis and Cressida, and though he had written to be read or to be read out loud, for our time was coming on a pace, he was sung by minstrels for a while, Rabindranath Tagore, like Chaucer's forerunners, writes music for his words, and one understands at every moment that he is so abundant, so spontaneous, so daring in his passion, so full of surprise, because he is doing something which has never seemed strange, unnatural or in need of defense. These verses will not lie in little well-printed books upon ladies' tables who turn the pages with indolent hands that they may sigh over a life without meaning, which is yet all they can know of life or be carried about by students at the university to be laid aside when the work of life begins, but as the generations pass, travelers will hum them on the highway, and men rowing upon rivers, lovers, while they await one another, shall find in murmuring them this love of God, a magic gulf wherein their own more bitter passion may bathe and renew its youth. At every moment the heart of this poet flows outward to these without derogation or condescension, for it has known that they will understand, and it has filled itself with the circumstances of their life. The traveler in the red-brown clothes that he wears, that dust may not show upon him, the girl searching in her bed for the petals fallen from the wreath of her royal lover, the servant or the bride awaiting the master's homecoming in the empty house, are images of the heart turning to God, flowers and rivers, the blowing of conch shells, the heavy rain of the Indian July, or the parching heart, or the parching heat, are images of the moods of that heart in union or in separation, and a man sitting in a boat upon a river playing upon a lute, like one of those figures full of mysterious meaning in a Chinese picture, is God himself, a whole people, a whole civilization, immeasurably strange to us, seems to have been taken up into this imagination, and yet we are not moved because of its strangeness, but because we have met our own image, as though we had walked in Rosetti's willow wood or heard perhaps for the first time in literature, our voice as in a dream. Since the Renaissance, the writing of European saints, however familiar their metaphor and the general structure of their thought has ceased to hold our attention, we know that we must at last forsake the world and we are accustomed in moments of weariness or exultation to consider a voluntary forsaking, but how can we, who have read so much poetry, seen so many paintings, listened to so much music, where the cry of the flesh and the cry of the soul seemed one, forsake it harshly and rudely? What have we in common with Saint Bernard covering his eyes that they may not dwell upon the beauty of the lakes of Switzerland or with the violent rhetoric of the book of Revelation? We would, if we might, find, as in this book, words full of courtesy. I have got my leave. Bid me farewell, my brothers. I bow to you all and take my departure. Here I give back the keys of my door and I give up all claims to my house. I only ask for last kind words from you. We were neighbors for long, but I received more than I could give. Now the day has dawned and the lamp that lit my dark corner is out. A summons has come and I am ready for my journey and it is our own mood when it is furthest from a campus or John of the Cross that cries. And because I love this life, I know I shall love death as well. Yet it is not only in our thoughts of the parting that this book fathoms all. We must not know that we loved God. Hardly it may be that we'd be believed in him. Yet looking backward upon our life, we discover in our exploration of the pathways of woods in our delight in the lonely places of hills. In that mysterious claim that we have made unavailingly on the women that we have loved. The emotion that created this insidious sweetness. Entering my heart unbidden even as one of the common crowd. Unknown to me, my King, thou didst press the signet of eternity upon many a fleeting moment. This is no longer the sanctity of the cell and of the scourge. Being but a lifting up as it were into a greater intensity of the mood of the painter painting the dust and the sunlight. And we go for a like voice to St. Francis and to William Blake, who have seemed so alien in our violent history.