In Stillness

Rabindranath Tagore

Gitanjali 48

ripples of bird songs

The morning doesn't begin gently—it **breaks**. Tagore uses the physics of water to describe sound: silence is a still surface, and birdsong is what shatters it into motion.

The morning sea of silence broke into ripples of bird songs;
and the flowers were all merry by the roadside;
and the wealth of gold was scattered through the rift of the clouds
while we busily went on our way and paid no heed.

paid no heed

The companions are so fixated on arrival that the entire sensory world—gold light, flowers, birdsong—registers as nothing. This is Tagore's portrait of ambition as a form of blindness.

We sang no glad songs nor played;
we went not to the village for barter;
we spoke not a word nor smiled;
we lingered not on the way.
We quickened our pace more and more as the time sped by.
The sun rose to the mid sky and doves cooed in the shade.
Withered leaves danced and whirled in the hot air of noon.
The shepherd boy drowsed and dreamed in the shadow of the banyan tree,
and I laid myself down by the water
and stretched my tired limbs on the grass.
My companions laughed at me in scorn;
they held their heads high and hurried on;
they never looked back nor rested;
they vanished in the distant blue haze.
They crossed many meadows and hills,
and passed through strange, far-away countries.
All honour to you, heroic host of the interminable path!
Mockery and reproach pricked me to rise, but found no response in me.

glad humiliation

An oxymoron that contains the poem's whole philosophy. **Humiliation** because the world judges rest as failure; **glad** because the speaker has discovered that failure was the point all along.

I gave myself up for lost in the depth of a glad humiliation
in the shadow of a dim delight.
The repose of the sun-embroidered green gloom slowly spread over my heart.

sun-embroidered green gloom

Three sensory layers fused into one image: sunlight (sight), green foliage (color), gloom (shadow). **Embroidered** makes the light a decorative pattern stitched onto darkness—nature as textile art.

I forgot for what I had travelled,
and I surrendered my mind without struggle to the maze of shadows and songs.
At last, when I woke from my slumber and opened my eyes,

flooding my sleep with thy smile

The divine doesn't arrive through effort but through surrender. The speaker spent the whole poem worrying about falling behind, only to find God waiting at the place where he stopped trying.

I saw thee standing by me, flooding my sleep with thy smile.
How I had feared that the path was long and wearisome,
and the struggle to reach thee was hard!
Source Wikipedia Poetry Foundation

Reading Notes

The Parable of Stopping

This prose poem stages a quiet rebellion against the gospel of productivity. The speaker's companions march forward relentlessly—"they held their heads high and hurried on; they never looked back nor rested"—and the poem initially frames this as admirable. "All honour to you, heroic host of the interminable path!"

But Tagore is being ironic. The companions vanish "in the distant blue haze," which sounds romantic until you realize: they disappear. They become nothing. The speaker, meanwhile, lies down by the water, surrenders to shade and birdsong, and God appears.

The structure mirrors the Bhagavad Gita's tension between action and renunciation, but Tagore resolves it differently. He doesn't argue for disciplined detachment within action. He argues for genuine stopping—for letting the body rest, the mind wander, the path be forgotten. The divine is not at the end of the road. It is in the grass beside it.

Why the Path Was Never Long

The final two sentences reverse everything:

How I had feared that the path was long and wearisome, and the struggle to reach thee was hard!

The speaker feared the difficulty—past tense. The fear was the obstacle, not the distance. By falling asleep under a tree, he accidentally did the one thing the striving companions could not: he stopped performing devotion and simply existed.

CONTEXT Tagore wrote *Gitanjali* (1912) as prose poems in English, self-translated from his Bengali *Geetanjali*. They won him the Nobel Prize in 1913. The "thee" throughout is addressed to God, but Tagore's God is not separate from the natural world—birdsong, banyan shade, and noon heat are all forms of divine presence. The poem's theology is simple: you cannot chase what is already everywhere.