Hard Times Poem By Rabindranath Tagore

Rabindranath Tagore (born May 7, 1861, Kolkata, India - died August 7, 1941, Kolkata), Bengali poet, short-story writer, song composer, essayist, playwright, painter, and playwright who introduced new prose and verse forms and the use of colloquial language into Bengali literature, thereby freeing it from traditional models based on classical Sanskrit. 

He was highly influential in introducing Indian culture to the West and vice versa, and he is generally regarded as the outstanding creative artist of early 20th century India. In 1913, he became the first non-European to receive the Nobel Prize in the field of Literature.

Hard Times Poem By Rabindranath Tagore

Music is silenced, the dark descending slowly

Has stripped unending skies of all companions.

Weariness grips your limbs and within the locked horizons

Dumbly ring the bells of hugely gathering fears.

Still, O bird, O sightless bird,

Not yet, not yet the time to furl your wings.

It's not melodious woodlands but the leaps and falls

Of an ocean's drowsy booming,

Not a grove bedecked with flowers but a tumult flecked with foam.

Where is the shore that stored your buds and leaves?

Where do the nest and the branches hold?

Still, O bird, my sightless bird,

Not yet, not yet the time to furl your wings.

Stretching in front of you the night's immensity

Hides the western hill where sleeps the distant sun;

Still, with bated breath, the world is counting time and swimming

Across the shoreless dark a crescent moon

Has thinly just appeared upon the dim horizon.

-But O my bird, O sightless bird,

Not yet, not yet the time to furl your wings.

From the upper skies the stars with pointing fingers

Intently watch your course and death's impatience

Lashes at you from the deeps in swirling waves;

And sad entreaties line the farthest shore

With hands outstretched and crooning 'Come, O come!'

Still, O bird, O sightless bird,

Not yet, not yet the time to furl your wings.

All that is past: your fears and loves and hopes;

All that is lost: your words and lamentation;

No longer yours a home nor a bed composed of flowers.

For wings are all you have, 

and the sky's broadening courtyard,

And the dawn steeped in darkness, 

lacking all direction.

Dear bird, my sightless bird, 

Not yet, not yet the time to furl your wings! 

Rabindranath Tagore

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