The Banyan Tree

Rabindranath Tagore 1861 (Kolkata) – 1941 (Kolkata)



O you shaggy-headed banyan tree standing on the bank of the pond,
have you forgotten the little chile, like the birds that have
nested in your branches and left you?
    Do you not remember how he sat at the window and wondered at
the tangle of your roots and plunged underground?
    The women would come to fill their jars in the pond, and your
huge black shadow would wriggle on the water like sleep struggling
to wake up.
    Sunlight danced on the ripples like restless tiny shuttles
weaving golden tapestry.
    Two ducks swam by the weedy margin above their shadows, and
the child would sit still and think.
    He longed to be the wind and blow through your resting
branches, to be your shadow and lengthen with the day on the water,
to be a bird and perch on your topmost twig, and to float like
those ducks among the weeds and shadows.

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Submitted on May 13, 2011

Modified on April 07, 2023

46 sec read
371

Quick analysis:

Scheme ABCDEFGHIJKLGMNO
Closest metre Iambic hexameter
Characters 838
Words 155
Stanzas 1
Stanza Lengths 16

Rabindranath Tagore

Rabindranath Tagore FRAS was an Indian polymath—poet, writer, playwright, composer, philosopher, social reformer and painter. He reshaped Bengali literature and music as well as Indian art with Contextual Modernism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. more…

All Rabindranath Tagore poems | Rabindranath Tagore Books

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