Photo – kmanflickr
Rabindranath Tagore – 1861-1941
Rabindranath Tagore was a Bengali poet and a man of many talents. He was a philosopher who established the Visva-Bharati University (Wikipedia) that has challenged conventional education.
He was the first Indian to win a Nobel for literature, he wrote poetry, fiction, drama, essays, and songs; and promoted reforms in education, aesthetics and religion.
The ruling British Government knighted him in 1915, but within a few years he resigned the honour as a protest against British policies in India.
Tagore was friends with Mahatma Gandhi and Albert Einstein.
Some media outlets are citing this poem as being among one of Audrey Hepburn’s favourites.
Unending Love
Unending Love
I seem to have loved you in numberless forms, numberless times
In life after life, in age after age, forever.
My spellbound heart has made and remade the necklace of songs,
That you take as a gift, wear round your neck in your many forms,
In life after life, in age after age, forever.Whenever I hear old chronicles of love, its age-old pain,
Its ancient tale of being apart or together.
As I stare on and on into the past, in the end you emerge,
Clad in the light of a pole-star piercing the darkness of time:
You become an image of what is remembered forever.You and I have floated here on the stream that brings from the fount.
At the heart of time, love of one for another.
We have played along side millions of lovers, shared in the same
Shy sweetness of meeting, the same distressful tears of farewell-
Old love but in shapes that renew and renew forever.Today it is heaped at your feet, it has found its end in you
The love of all man’s days both past and forever:
Universal joy, universal sorrow, universal life.
The memories of all loves merging with this one love of ours
And the songs of every poet past and forever.― Rabindranath Tagore, Selected Poems