Letters from a Young Poet Read Online Free PDF Page A

describes a side of himself as ‘wild’, ‘uncivilized’, even ‘crazy’, someone who writes poetry when ‘restless with joy, heedless and thirsty like an inebriated, plaintive and self-forgetful madman’. He wishes to be as nomadicas an Arab ‘Bedouin’ rather than a fussy Bengali. (‘But I’m not a Bedouin, I’m a Bengali. I will sit in a corner and nitpick, I will judge, argue, turn my mind over once this way and then the other way—in the way one fries fish—you let one side splutter and sizzle in the boiling oil, and then you turn it over to let the other side sputter.’) Over and over again, he rails against ‘civilized society’, polite company and the compunction of manners. On one occasion, he writes to Indira about this desire for freedom: ‘Remember Satya had said to me, “There’s a real air of luxury about you, like the Muslim nababs”? That’s not entirely true; in the sense that my nabābi is a mental nabābi—there, in my own kingdom, I don’t want any restrictions on me, I want an unchecked right in my domain.’ This luxury of mind, therefore, is premised on the exact opposite of material luxury, a mentality that took as a mantra Goethe’s injunction to ‘do without’; a temperament that spontaneously exclaims on a February afternoon in Shilaidaha: ‘There’s such a particular feeling of renunciation in the Indian sunlight that nobody has the power to evade it.’ He continues again a few months later: ‘You know how I cite the breezes of India as an excuse for rebellion against undertaking my duties? There’s a deeper significance to that, Bob.’ Doing nothing is serious business; it is what facilitates poetry; it is the foundation upon which poetry can be about ‘the unnecessary’.
The Young Woman
    The woman who receives these letters, affectionately called ‘Bob’ in some of them, is a silent but considerable presence in this book, an equal as an interlocutor, and not one to be written out of the narrative of its history. This is corroborated by Rabindranath himself repeatedly. As he said to Indira on 7 October 1894, he feels his letters achieve completion because they are addressed to her, and are expressive not only of his own inner essence but also of hers—just as Byron’s letters to Thomas Moore express not just Byron’s personality but Moore’s as well:
Both the person who listens and the person who speaks are together responsible for the composition—
    ‘
taṭer buke lāge jaler dheu,
    tabe se kalatānu uṭhe
.
    btse banasabh ihari kape,
    tabe se marmar phuṭe.
’
    (The waves beat upon the shore’s breast,
    Only then does its murmur rise.
    The assembled woods tremble in the wind,
    Only then does that rustle materialize.)
    The letter had begun with a passage that was subsequently used as a preface for the
Chinnapatrābalī
:
I too know, Bob, that the letters I’ve written to you express the many-hued feelings of my heart in a way that hasn’t been possible in any of my other writings…. When I write to you it never crosses my mind that you might not understand something I may say, or may misunderstand it, or disbelieve it, or think of those things which are the deepest truths to me as merely well-composed poeticisms. That’s why I can say exactly what I’m thinking quite easily to you…. It’s not just because you’ve known me for a very long time that I’m able to express my feelings to you; you have such a genuine nature, such a simple love for the truth, that the truth expresses itself spontaneously to you. That’s by your particular talent. If the best writings of any writer are to be found in his letters alone then we must surmise that the person to whom they are written also has a letter-writing ability. I have written letters to so many others, but nobody else has attracted my entire self to themselves in writing.
    Her ‘genuine nature’ and simple honesty have been attested to by others apart from her favourite uncle, coming up