Deliverance for me is not in renunciation. I feel the embrace of freedom in a thousand bonds of delight.
Thou ever pourest for me the fresh draught of thy wine of various colors and fragrance, filling this earthen vessel to the brim.
My world will light its hundred different lamps with thy flame and place them before the altar of thy temple.
No, I will never shut the doors of my senses. The delights of sight and hearing and touch will bear thy delight.
Yes, all my illusions will burn into an illumination of joy, and all my desires ripen into fruits of love.
{Rabindranath Tagore}

Tagore won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1913. He lived from 1861 to 1941 and was an accomplished writer in short stories, drama, essays, and more,  a musician, a business man; but he was primarily a poet, and it is his poetry that garnered him fame in the West and the East. His Gitanjali {Song Offerings}, from which this poem is taken, is one of his best known works. The translation is Tagore’s own.

Yeats said of Tagore, in his introduction to Gitanjali: “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 defence.”

Image courtesy of danyul.