English version by R. H. Blyth

It is deep autumn
My neighbor
How does he live, I wonder.

/ Image by Anthony Ievlev /

Some haiku can put us into a dream state, painting in the inner eye a whole landscape, bringing us deeply into an expansive moment in time. And Basho is one of the greatest masters of the art form. Yet, this particular haiku doesn’t touch me that way. It is simple, pared down to almost nothing. There is no artistic evocation of the natural world, other than the observation that it is autumn. And then a question about his neighbor. My first reaction is to be disappointed by the haiku. And then I sit with it and I find so much more welling up within me as I let it percolate in my mind.

The mere mention of “deep autumn” infuses me with the tentative melancholy of the season. Looking outside my window on this chilly autumn morning in Oregon, I see trees with bright yellows and reds beneath a gray sky, and I know how quickly this lovely scene will pass. It makes the beauty all the more magical somehow. It’s as if the life I took for granted throughout the spring and summer is leaving this world and journeying to the otherworld, and I have caught sight of its departure.

But Basho immediately wonders about his neighbor, how he lives. Why?

I imagine it is because autumn is the time when abundance shifts to meager portions. When the world is full of ripeness, we assume all are doing well. But when branches are bare the heart, when it is not shut down, asks how does my neighbor provide his next meal? How does he keep his house warm?

Perhaps this poem is an observation that autumn is a time for empathy, for compassion, as we appreciate the fragile beauty of the world.

Recommended Books: Matsuo Basho

Zen Poetry: Let the Spring Breeze Enter	The Enlightened Heart: An Anthology of Sacred Poetry	Haiku Enlightenment: New Expanded Edition	The Poetry of Zen: (Shambhala Library)	The Four Seasons: Japanese Haiku
More Books >>

Matsuo Basho Japan (1644 – 1694) Timeline Buddhist : Zen / Chan

Matsuo Bashō is the poet who gave haiku its soul. Before him, haikai verse was mostly a parlor game of wordplay and clever allusion. In his hands, those seventeen syllables became a way of seeing, a way of standing so quietly in the present moment that a frog, a crow, or the sound of water could open into the whole of existence.

He was born in 1644 in Iga Province, into a family of low samurai rank. As a young man he entered the service of Tōdō Yoshitada, a young lord just a couple of years older than he was, who loved poetry. The two wrote verse together, and it seems to have been a real friendship. When Yoshitada died suddenly in 1666, Bashō’s place in that world went with him. He left service, and for several years we lose track of him. Later in life he admitted that he had once wanted an official post and a secure place in society. That door had closed.

Around 1672 he went to Edo and slowly made a name for himself as a haikai master, with students and a following. Then, in 1680, he did something unexpected: he walked away from the city’s literary scene and moved into a simple hut across the river in Fukagawa. A student planted a banana tree (bashō) beside it. Its big, ragged leaves tore easily in the wind, and he loved it. The hut came to be called the Bashō-an, and the poet took his name from it.

These were years of inner searching. He studied Zen with a priest named Butchō, who was staying nearby, and sat in meditation. In the winter of 1682 a fire swept through the neighborhood and burned his hut. The next year his mother died. Loss kept teaching him the old Buddhist lesson that nothing holds still. He came to see impermanence not as a tragedy to resist, but as the very texture of life, to be met with open eyes.

In 1686 he wrote the poem that became one of the most famous haiku ever written:

old pond —
a frog jumps in,
the sound of water

It is so simple that people often miss what’s happening. The stillness of the pond, a sudden small splash, and then stillness again. The whole poem lives in that one instant when the silence is broken and you realize how deep the silence was.

From 1684 on, Bashō spent much of his life on the road. He walked the countryside of Japan in a monk’s robes and straw sandals, carrying almost nothing, following in the footsteps of the wandering poet-monk Saigyō, who had lived five centuries earlier. Travel for Bashō was a spiritual practice, a way of letting go of home and security and meeting each moment new. His greatest journey began in the spring of 1689, when he and his student Sora set out into the remote north. That five-month walk of well over a thousand miles became Oku no Hosomichi, The Narrow Road to the Deep North. It opens with the thought that the months and days are themselves travelers, and that each year passing through is a wanderer too. To travel, for Bashō, was simply to live honestly with the way things are.

He sometimes said that he had thought about becoming a monk, but had instead given his whole life to a single line of poetry. His poetry was the path. In his last years he spoke of karumi, “lightness”: not withdrawing from ordinary life, but touching it gently, with nothing extra added, poems as plain and clear as water.

He died in Osaka in 1694, on one last journey, surrounded by his students. His farewell poem was:

sick on a journey —
my dreams go wandering
over withered fields

Bashō reminds us that the sacred is not somewhere else. It is in the frog, the cicada, the autumn wind, the passing of a single moment, if we can become quiet enough to notice.

More poetry by Matsuo Basho

English version by W. S. Merwin

The Milky Way
      pours waterfalls
            over this human world
the cold
      rushing tumbling sounds
            echo through the blue sky
Veneration
      to the Great Compassionate
            Avilokiteshvara
How lucky I am
      to have no trouble
            hearing

— from Sun at Midnight: Muso Soseki – Poems and Sermons, Translated by W. S. Merwin / Translated by Soiku Shigematsu

/ Image by Evgeni Tcherkasski /

I love that opening phase–

The Milky Way
      pours waterfalls
            over this human world

I imagine stepping outside after a long day, standing beneath the night sky, and letting the waters of the universe wash over me. It’s a cleansing image, purifying, healing to the wearied spirit.

the cold
      rushing tumbling sounds
            echo through the blue sky

Soseki emphasizes sound, the waterfall-like sound of the night. Try it sometime to remind yourself. Late at night, step outside, or just open the window and lean your head out. Close your eyes. Listen. Do you hear it? In the absence of all other noise, with no movement around and with thoughts at rest… a soft sound is heard. At first it might be like the quiet chirping of crickets in the night, the hum of beesong, or the flowing of gentle stream. It is heard as a random, soothing “white noise” that seems to emanate from the base of the skull.

As we quiet more, the sound grows into a rushing sound, like a waterfall. Sometimes this sound resolves into a clear pitch that can resemble the pure note of a flute or the ringing of a bell.

First it is heard and, finally, felt throughout the body.

This sound is Krishna’s flute calling his devotees to him. It is the ringing of the bells of paradise. It is Soseki’s heavenly waterfall.

This sound signals the beginning of deep meditation. The more we sit with this sound, the more the awareness expands and the heart naturally opens with inherent compassion, as the universal waters pour over us, refreshing us, revitalizing, awakening.

How lucky I am
      to have no trouble
            hearing

Recommended Books: Muso Soseki

Sun at Midnight: Muso Soseki – Poems and Sermons	East Window: Poems from Asia	Roaring Stream: A New Zen Reader

Muso Soseki Japan (1275 – 1351) Timeline Buddhist : Zen / Chan

Musō Soseki was a Japanese Zen master of the fourteenth century, and today he is best remembered for his gardens. The gardens of Saihō-ji, the “Moss Temple,” and of Tenryū-ji in Kyoto still draw visitors from all over the world. Behind the art of gardening was a quiet man, a monk who longed for solitude, wrote poems of mountain stillness, but who kept being called back into the world to work for peace and reconciliation in a time of war.

He was born in 1275 in Ise Province into a family of minor nobility. His mother died when he was about four, and as a young boy he was placed in a temple, where he studied the esoteric teachings of the Shingon and Tendai schools. He was a gifted student, and at eighteen he was formally ordained at Tōdai-ji in Nara.

His spiritual journey began through grief, however. A teacher he respected died, and for all the teacher’s learning, the story goes, he did not die in peace. That left the young monk shaken, wondering what scripture study could really accomplish. He went into a hundred-day retreat, and near its end he dreamed that he visited two temples in China, Sozan and Sekitō, where a monk handed him a portrait of Bodhidharma, the founder of Zen. Inspired by the dream he took the name Soseki, combining the names from those two temples, and Musō meaning “Dream Window.”

His Zen training wasn’t easy. He first went to Yishan Yining, a Chinese master teaching in Kamakura. When Musō pressed him for instruction, the old master is said to have answered, “In our school there are no words, and no teaching to give.” Musō spent the next several years moving between teachers and remote hermitages, sitting alone in the mountains. In 1305, at a hermitage in Hitachi, he sat in meditation late into the night. When he finally went to lie down, he leaned toward a wall that he thought was there, but wasn’t. As he fell, something opened. He laughed out loud. In the poem he wrote afterward, he said he had spent years digging in the earth for the blue of the sky, and then, tripping in the dark, found that the sky had been there all along. His teacher Kōhō Kennichi confirmed the awakening.

He would happily have remained an unknown monk, but students and patrons found him. Japan at the time was sliding into civil war, and the powerful wanted him close. Emperor Go-Daigo made him abbot of Nanzen-ji in Kyoto. When Go-Daigo was overthrown, the new shogun, Ashikaga Takauji, became Musō’s student too. Musō used his influence to encourage peace in the realm. He persuaded Takauji to build a temple and a pagoda in every province for the dead of both sides of the war, and to found Tenryū-ji in memory of the very emperor Takauji had driven from power. Over his life, seven emperors honored him as their teacher.

Musō Soseki elevated the art of gardening to a high level and used it as an expression of his teaching. A pond, a slope of rocks, a dry waterfall made of stones were places for practice, where the mind could recognize its own nature in the landscape. He wrote that anyone who separates the garden from the practice hasn’t yet found the true Way.

His poems, written mostly in classical Chinese as Japanese Zen monks did then, are full of mountains, moonlight, wind in the pines, and the hermit’s hut. They are spacious, unhurried poems, often with a quiet smile in them, and they keep returning to the discovery of that night of stumbling into enlightenment: what we are searching for has never been anywhere else than right here.

He died in 1351. His many students carried his line forward, and the culture of the great Zen monasteries he helped shape, with their poetry, gardens, and ink painting, became one of the lasting treasures of Japan.

More poetry by Muso Soseki

English version by Andrew Harvey

I went looking for Him
And lost myself;
The drop merged with the Sea —
Who can find it now?

Looking and looking for Him
I lost myself;
The Sea merged with the drop —
Who can find it now?

— from Perfume of the Desert: Inspirations from Sufi Wisdom, by Andrew Harvey / Eryk Hanut

/ Image by Mark Harpur /

The drop and the sea — this is a classic spiritual metaphor used by many teachers in several traditions. We can think of the Sea as a metaphor for God, the vast reality which includes each of us as individual drops.

Kabir says, “I went looking for Him…” The drop went looking for the Sea. There is an absurdity in that. How can a drop go looking for the Sea? The drop is already IN the Sea, part of it. In discovering the Sea, the drop recognizes that the Sea is water, just as the drop itself is water. Water within water. Finally recognizing this, how can the drop maintain the illusion of separation? There is no dividing line between water and water — no skin, no barrier, no separation. The drop loses its false sense of being a drop. It loses itself, it loses its ‘dropness,’ and merges with the immense continuity of the Sea.

At that point there is no separate self, no one to go seeking. “Who can find it now?” There is only the Sea and no one to go looking for it.

Recommended Books: Kabir

The Longing in Between: Sacred Poetry from Around the World (A Poetry Chaikhana Anthology)	The Enlightened Heart: An Anthology of Sacred Poetry	Islamic Mystical Poetry: Sufi Verse from the Early Mystics to Rumi	Perfume of the Desert: Inspirations from Sufi Wisdom	Songs of the Saints of India
More Books >>

Kabir India (15th Century) Timeline Muslim / Sufi Yoga / Hindu

Kabir is not easily categorized as a Sufi or a Yogi — he is all of these. He is revered by Muslims, Hindus, and Sikhs. He stands as a unique, saintly, yet very human, bridge between the great traditions that live in India. Kabir says of himself that he is, “at once the child of Allah and Ram.”

He was born in Varanasi (Benares), India, probably around the year 1440 (though other accounts place his birth as early as 1398), to Muslim parents. But early in his life Kabir became a disciple of the Hindu bhakti saint Ramananda. It was unusual for a Hindu teacher to accept a Muslim student, but tradition says the young Kabir found a creative way to overcome all objections.

The story is told that on one particular day of the year, anyone can become a disciple by having a master speak the name of God over him. It is common for those who live near the Ganges to take their morning bath there in the sacred waters. The bhakti saint Ramananda took his bath as he did every day, by arising before dawn. On this special day, Ramananda awoke before dawn and found his customary way down to the steps of the Ganges. As he was walking down the steps to the waters, a little hand reached out in the predawn morning and grabbed the saint’s big toe. Ramananda was taken by surprise and he expressed his shock by calling out the name of God. Looking down he saw in the early morning light the hand of the young Kabir. After his bath in the early light he noticed that on the back of the little one’s hand was written in Arabic the name Kabir.  He adopted him as son and disciple and brought him back to his ashram, much to the disturbance of his Hindu students, some of whom left in righteous protest.

Not much is known about what sort of spiritual training Kabir may have received. He did not become a sadhu or rununciate. Kabir never abandoned worldly life, choosing instead to live the balanced life of a householder and mystic, tradesman and contemplative. Kabir was married, had children, and lived the simple life of a weaver.

Although Kabir labored to bring the often clashing religious cultures of Islam and Hinduism together, he was equally disdainful of professional piety in any form. This earned him the hatred and persecution of the religious authorities in Varanasi. Nearing age 60, he was denounced before the king but, because of his Muslim birth, he was spared execution and, instead, banished from the region.

He subsequently lived a life of exile, traveling through northern India with a group of disciples. In 1518, he died at Maghar near Gorakhpur.

One of the most loved legends associated with Kabir is told of his funeral. Kabir’s disciples disputed over his body, the Muslims wanting to claim the body for burial, the Hindus wanting to cremate the body. Kabir appeared to the arguing disciples and told them to lift the burial shroud. When they did so, they found fragrant flowers where the body had rested. The flowers were divided, and the Muslims buried the flowers while the Hindus reverently committed them to fire.

More poetry by Kabir

English version by Tony Stewart and Chase Twitchell

Listen, can you hear it?
His bamboo flute speaks
the pure language of love.
The moon enlightens the trees,
the path, the sinuous Yamuna.
Oblivious of the jasmine’s scent
I stagger around,
disheveled heart bereft of modesty,
eyes wet with nerves and delight.
Tell me, dear friend, say it aloud:
is he not my own Dark Lord Syama?
Is it not my name his flute pours
into the empty evening?

Go to her, Lord, go now.
What’s stopping you?
The earth drowns in sleep.
Let’s go. I’ll walk with you.

— from The Lover of God, by Rabindranath Tagore / Translated by Tony Stewart

/ Image by Rajesh Nagulakond /

There is a fascinating story behind this poem and the other poems of Tagore’s The Lover of God… In the late 19th century, a respected Bengali journal published a newly discovered collection poems by a previously unknown 17th century poet, Bhanusimha, or Sun Lion. The critics celebrated these newly unearthed bhakti masterpieces.

The problem was that Bhanusimha never actually existed. Bhanisimha was the pseudonym used by a brilliant 14-year-old boy — the young Rabindranath Tagore.

He of course matured into one of the greatest poets of modern India.

Tagore continued to edit and refine these poems over his lifetime, leaving us with a collection of modern bhakti masterpieces.

Just a few notes about this selection:

As with many bhakti poems, this is, on the surface, a poem of love and longing. Radha pines for her beloved, Krishna. But these are usually understood to reflect deeper truths. It’s always fascinating the response I notice when I recite a bhakti poem aloud — with emotion, with passion, but also with a sense of the deep spiritual longing that imbues the phrases. It evokes a direct, intimate form of worship and connection to the Divine.

Radha (the poem’s speaker) is the soul, the lover of God, the spiritual seeker. Krishna (Syama) is God, the Beloved.

Krishna plays a flute, an enchanting melody that calls all souls to himself. The sound of his flute is the hum that underlies all creation, the soft sound heard in the silence of meditation.

His beauty is often compared with the moon. This moon is also the luminescence of enlightenment.

The Yamuna is one of the great rivers of India, feeding into the mighty Ganges, but she is also a goddess who fell in love with Krishna. So the reference to the sinuous Yamuna is meant to evoke both an erotic femininity and also emphasize that love for Krishna. To dissolve in the Yamuna is to disappear into eternal love for God/Krishna.

The final verse switches from Radha’s voice to the poet’s, encouraging Krishna to respond to the longing of the soul. Something quite playful in that…

Go to her, Lord, go now.
What’s stopping you?
The earth drowns in sleep.
Let’s go. I’ll walk with you.

Recommended Books: Rabindranath Tagore

The Longing in Between: Sacred Poetry from Around the World (A Poetry Chaikhana Anthology)	Gitanjali	The Lover of God	The Fugitive	Lover’s Gift and Crossing
More Books >>

Rabindranath Tagore India (1861 – 1941) Timeline Yoga / Hindu

Rabindranath Tagore wrote the national anthems of two countries, founded a university, and in 1913 became the first non-European to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature. It is easy to let all of that stand in front of the poems. But the work readers actually love him for — the Gitanjali songs above all — came out of something much quieter: a dawn on a Calcutta veranda when he was twenty-one, when the world briefly came unveiled, and then a lifetime of learning how to live in the light of what he had seen. He spent that life refusing to keep God in a temple. He looked instead in the river, in the human face, in the man breaking stones by the roadside.

—

Life

He was born on May 7, 1861, in the Jorasanko mansion in Calcutta, the youngest of thirteen surviving children in one of the most remarkable families in Bengal. His grandfather Dwarkanath had been a merchant prince; his father, Debendranath, was known as the Maharshi, the great sage, and led the Brahmo Samaj — the reform movement that had turned back to the Upanishads for a formless, imageless God and set aside caste ritual and idol worship. The house was full of musicians, playwrights, philosophers and magazines. Rabindranath grew up inside a living argument about what religion was for.

It was also a lonely childhood. He was raised largely by servants — he later called it, wryly, a kind of servocracy — with his father away for long stretches and his mother, Sarada Devi, absorbed in an enormous household. She died in March 1875, when he was thirteen. In *My Reminiscences* he admits that the grief did not arrive at once; it came later, at the thought that she would never again come through that particular door.

Two years before that, at eleven, he had been taken away by his father for four months — to Santiniketan, to Amritsar, and finally up to Dalhousie in the Himalayas. At the Golden Temple he heard the Sikhs singing and never forgot it. In the mountains he rose before light to learn Sanskrit verses from the Upanishads at his father’s side. It was the first time the family religion stopped being furniture and became something he was actually doing.

At sixteen he pulled off a small literary fraud. He produced a sheaf of devotional poems in archaic Bengali, attributed them to Bhanusimha, a seventeenth-century Vaishnava poet whose manuscripts had supposedly just come to light, and watched the scholars accept them. It is worth noticing what that means: his first religious poems were written in costume, in someone else’s voice, because the longing in them was not yet his to claim. Sent to England in 1878 to become a barrister, he studied nothing in particular, read Shakespeare and Sir Thomas Browne, and came home after less than two years without a degree and without apology.

Then, in 1882, came the morning that changed everything — a sunrise seen from a veranda on Sudder Street that split his life into before and after.

In December 1883 he married Mrinalini Devi. Four months later, in April 1884, Kadambari Devi — his brother Jyotirindranath’s wife, and the companion of his youth, his first reader and sharpest critic — took her own life at twenty-four. He was writing toward her, in one way or another, for the rest of his life.

In 1890 his father sent him out to manage the family estates at Shilaidaha, on the Padma river in what is now Bangladesh. He stayed, on and off, for a decade — much of it on a houseboat, drifting, watching the water and the villages. He collected token rents, sat with farmers, and listened to the wandering Baul singers of the district. Those years made him. Then, in 1901, he founded a school at Santiniketan: classes held outdoors under the trees, a marble prayer hall, a library, a garden.

What followed was a run of loss that would have broken most people. His wife Mrinalini died in 1902; his daughter Renuka in 1903; his father in 1905; his youngest son, Samindranath, of cholera in 1907. His daughter Bela died in 1918. The Bengali Gitanjali (1910) rose directly out of that ground.

In 1912, sailing to England and unwell, he began putting the songs into English prose to occupy himself — nothing more ambitious than that. W. B. Yeats read the pages and was undone by them. The India Society published the little book in November 1912; the Nobel Prize came a year later, in November 1913.

Knighted in 1915, he gave the honor back after the Jallianwala Bagh massacre of April 1919, writing to the Viceroy that “badges of honour make our shame glaring in their incongruous context of humiliation, and I for my part wish to stand, shorn of all special distinctions, by the side of my countrymen.”

The last decades were restless and enormous. He built Visva-Bharati into a university in 1921 and added a rural reconstruction institute at Sriniketan the following year. He traveled to more than thirty countries, delivered the Hibbert Lectures at Oxford in 1930, argued with Einstein about the nature of reality, denounced Mussolini in print after meeting him, and publicly rebuked Gandhi in 1934 for calling the Bihar earthquake divine punishment. In his late sixties he took up painting and produced thousands of images. He died on August 7, 1941, at eighty, in an upstairs room of the Jorasanko house where he had been born.

—

Spiritual Context

Tagore inherited a religion and then had to find out whether it was true.

What he inherited was unusually good raw material: the Brahmo Samaj’s austere monotheism, drawn straight from the Upanishads — one reality, without form, present everywhere, not to be housed in an image. But it was his father’s, and for years it stayed his father’s.

The morning that made it his own came in 1882, at 10 Sudder Street in Calcutta, where he was living with his brother and Kadambari. He was standing on the veranda at sunrise, looking at the tops of the trees, when — as he later put it in My Reminiscences — “a covering seemed to fall away from my eyes, and I found the world bathed in a wonderful radiance, with waves of beauty and joy swelling on every side.” Nothing was trivial after that; nothing was ugly. The same day he wrote Nirjharer Swapnabhanga — “The Awakening of the Waterfall” — a poem that comes down the page like water breaking out of ice. It fed the whole of Prabhat Sangit (Morning Songs) in 1883.

And then it faded. The radiance stayed with him for some days, dimmed, and was gone by the time he reached Darjeeling. Everything afterward is the work of a man who has seen something once and refuses either to forget it or to pretend he still has it.

The Padma years gave that vision a human face. Drifting on the river in the 1890s, Tagore came to know the songs of the Bauls — the wandering, half-mad, deliberately casteless minstrels of Bengal who belong to no religion and borrow from all of them. Through a village postmaster named Gagan Harkara he encountered the songs of the great Baul, Lalon. What the Bauls sing about is the moner manush, the man of the heart: God not above the world but hidden inside the human being, to be found nowhere else and by no shortcut. That idea went straight into the marrow of Tagore’s work, and he never disguised the debt. When he stood up at Oxford in 1930 to deliver the Hibbert Lectures — the height of his fame, the most establishment platform imaginable — he built his argument toward the divinity of man and the humanity of God, and then appended to the published book a section on the Baul singers of Bengal. He gave the last word to illiterate villagers.

The God of his poems has a name he coined himself: Jivan Devata, the Lord of his life. Not a monarch and not an abstraction — a presence that is lover, friend, guest, master and stranger by turns, who lives his life through him and who is sometimes maddeningly late in arriving. This is why Gitanjali reads as both prayer and love poetry, and why it never resolves into doctrine.

He had no patience for renunciation as a spiritual career, and none at all for piety that turns its back on the world. Gitanjali 11 is as close to a manifesto as he wrote:

Leave this chanting and singing and telling of beads! Whom dost thou worship in this lonely dark corner of a temple with doors all shut? Open thine eyes and see thy God is not before thee!

He is there where the tiller is tilling the hard ground and where the path-maker is breaking stones. He is with them in sun and in shower, and his garment is covered with dust. Put off thy holy mantle and even like him come down on the dusty soil!

That is the whole of his religion in four sentences — and it is also why his politics and his mysticism were never separable. The man who wrote that was the same man who handed back a knighthood.

—

The Poetry

Most of his poetry is song. Tagore wrote well over two thousand of them, words and music together, and in Bengal they are not literature but common property — sung at weddings and funerals, on the radio, by people who could not name the collection they come from. Reading him only on the page is like reading a hymn book and thinking you have heard the singing.

What you notice first in the poems is how close he stands to the one he is addressing. There is almost no distance in them, and almost no formality. The beloved is expected — a lamp is lit, a room is swept, and then there is waiting, and the waiting itself becomes the poem. He is unembarrassed by longing, unembarrassed by joy, and entirely willing to sound small: “Thou hast made me endless, such is thy pleasure. This frail vessel thou emptiest again and again, and fillest it ever with fresh life.”

Then there is the weather. Very little of his work happens indoors. Rain, rivers, boats, the first storm of the monsoon, a road going somewhere, a flute heard from across a field — these are not decoration but the actual furniture of his spiritual life, and they come from the decade on the Padma.

And there is his refusal to make death an enemy. Having buried a wife, a father and three children, he wrote some of the most untroubled poems about dying in any language — not consolation exactly, more a kind of courtesy extended to the last guest.

What a reader should listen for is the intimacy. He is not describing God. He is talking to someone.

—

Translations

Tagore’s own English versions — Gitanjali: Song Offerings (1912), and the volumes that followed — are the ones the world fell in love with, but they are transcreations, not translations. He turned tightly rhymed and metered Bengali lyrics into unrhymed English prose, cut and recombined freely, and drew the 103 pieces of Song Offerings not only from the Bengali Gitanjali but from half a dozen other books. He also reached for a King James solemnity — thee, thou, hath — that the Bengali does not have. The result is beautiful and it is genuinely his, but it is a softer, more churchly, more archaic poet than the one Bengali readers know, and it is the main reason his Western reputation cooled for decades after the Nobel.

For readers who want to hear the other Tagore:

– William Radice, Selected Poems (Penguin, 1985) — the translation that reopened Tagore in English; keeps the muscle and the form.
– Ketaki Kushari Dyson, I Won’t Let You Go (Bloodaxe) — widely regarded as the closest anyone has come to the musicality and the sensuous Bengali-ness of the originals.
– Tony K. Stewart and Chase Twichell, The Lover of God (Copper Canyon, 2003) — the Bhanusimha poems, the teenage forgery, rendered as the passionate Vaishnava love poetry it always was.
– Joe Winter, Song Offerings — a verse translation of the Bengali *Gitanjali* that restores the rhyme and meter Tagore himself abandoned in English.
– Wendy Barker and Saranindranath Tagore, Rabindranath Tagore: Final Poems — the last work, written as he was dying.

More poetry by Rabindranath Tagore

And the world cannot be discovered by a journey of miles,
no matter how long,
but only by a spiritual journey,
a journey of one inch,
very arduous and humbling and joyful,
by which we arrive at the ground at our feet,
and learn to be at home.

— from The Collected Poems of Wendell Berry, 1957-1982, by Wendell Berry

/ Image by LittleLottexo /

The poet Wendell Berry passed away earlier this week, and I’ve been returning to his poems all week, his quiet voice speaking to me as I go about my work day and find silent moments amidst my activity.

Several of his poems have become part of my interior space. The Peace of Wild Things, The Real Work, How to Be a Poet, The Wild Geese, his Sabbath poems. But I chose to feature this one today. It’s short. It feels almost like a Zen koan. Yet it is speaking to me. I hope it says something to you too.

—

Few writers these days are truly willing to be still and to befriend the world of growing things outside the city limits. In the modern world, that’s practically blasphemy. Writers like that get labeled “poet” and “crank” so they can be safely ignored — unless their writing is unavoidably good. Unfortunately for the hyperactive world, Wendell Berry’s poetry is filled with the presence and heart secretly craved by us all, making his words difficult to ignore.

And the world cannot be discovered by a journey of miles,
no matter how long…

Recommended Books: Wendell Berry

The Collected Poems of Wendell Berry, 1957-1982	Given: Poems	Selected Poems of Wendell Berry	A Timbered Choir: The Sabbath Poems 1979-1997	The Mad Farmer Poems
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Wendell Berry US (1934 – 2026) Timeline Secular or Eclectic

Wendell Berry spent nearly sixty years on a hillside farm above the Kentucky River, writing poems, novels, and essays that circled back again and again to a single conviction: the world is holy, it has been given to us rather than owned by us, and how we treat a field, a creek, or a neighbor is a spiritual act. He became one of America’s great dissenting voices — a patient, unyielding critic of industrial agriculture and extraction. But beneath the argument was something quieter: a lifelong practice of attention and reverence, carried out mostly on foot, in the woods, on Sunday mornings. He died at home in Port Royal, Kentucky, on August 31, 2026.

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Life

He was born in Louisville on August 5, 1934, and raised in Henry County, Kentucky, on land his family had farmed for generations on both sides. That inheritance became the whole subject of his life’s work.

He was a gifted young writer. He took degrees at the University of Kentucky, went to Stanford on a Wallace Stegner Fellowship in 1958 (Ken Kesey, Larry McMurtry, and Ernest Gaines were among his classmates), traveled to Italy and France on a Guggenheim, and taught at New York University in the early sixties. He was on the path a promising American writer was supposed to take.

Then, on the Fourth of July in 1965, he moved his wife Tanya and their two children back to Henry County — to a twelve-acre place called Lane’s Landing, on the western bank of the Kentucky River near Port Royal. Everyone told him it was a mistake; a writer went to New York, not away from it. In “A Native Hill” he explained his reasoning: he had found the place he was answerable to.

He stayed for sixty-one years. He farmed the hillside with draft horses when tractors would have been easier, kept sheep, wrote in a cabin he had rebuilt himself, and never in his life owned a computer — he wrote by hand and typed the pages on a machine he bought new in 1956, with Tanya as his first reader and editor. This was not nostalgia. It was an argument made with his own body: that scale, limit, and the willingness to do work slowly are not obstacles to a good life but its conditions.

From that fixed point he became a formidable public conscience. He spoke against the Vietnam War in 1968, was arrested at a nuclear plant protest in 1979, debated the Secretary of Agriculture on the ruin of small farms, withdrew his own papers from the University of Kentucky in 2009 over its coziness with the coal industry, and at seventy-six joined a weekend sit-in at the Kentucky governor’s office to protest mountaintop removal mining. He accepted honors — including the National Humanities Medal — without ever seeming to need them, and went home afterward to the same chores.

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Spiritual Context

Berry was raised Baptist, baptized at New Castle and belonging, loosely and lifelong, to the small Baptist church at Port Royal. But he was honest about the looseness. He called himself a “marginal” Christian, or better, a “forest” Christian: in good weather he was more likely to be walking his ridges than sitting in a pew. He said plainly that he took the Gospels very seriously — more seriously, he suspected, than much of the church did — and his 1993 essay “Christianity and the Survival of Creation” is one of the most searching indictments a believer has written of his own tradition. If Christians read their own scriptures closely, he argued, they would find themselves called to steward the world rather than strip it.

Out of that came the sentence that may be his most quietly radical: “There are no sacred and unsacred places; there are only sacred and desecrated places.” It refuses the whole architecture of separation — sanctuary from field, spirit from dirt, worship from work.

His actual devotional practice was walking. Beginning in 1979 he spent Sunday mornings outdoors on his own land, and wrote what came — poems he called the Sabbath poems, an unbroken practice of nearly fifty years. They are the closest thing we have to a record of his inner life: unhurried, attentive, written in the presence of trees rather than about them.

He was a friend, briefly, of Thomas Merton, eighty miles south at Gethsemani; they exchanged letters and shared a lunch in December 1967, a year before Merton’s death. The two men were working the same seam from different sides of the cloister wall — silence, place, refusal of the age’s momentum.

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The Poetry

Berry’s poems are plainspoken to the point of transparency. There is no glitter in them, no straining for the striking image. They read like someone speaking carefully to you across a table, and their power sneaks up: you finish one and find it has quietly taken something off your chest.

The great subject is presence — the ordinary world attended to until it opens. “The Peace of Wild Things” begins in fear, in the middle of the night, and ends in the presence of still water and “the day-blind stars”; it has become, for many readers, something closer to a prayer than a poem. The Sabbath poems have the cadence of the Psalms without their formality. And when he was in the mood to be dangerous he wrote “Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front,” a poem that instructs the reader in cheerful sabotage of the profit motive and ends with two words that are as good a summary of his theology as anything he wrote: “Practice resurrection.”

He knew exactly what silence was worth, and where poems come from. “Accept what comes from silence,” he wrote. “Make the best you can of it.” And then, with a candor rare in a poet: “To be quiet, even wordless, in a good place is a better gift than poetry.”

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