The Gardener LXIV: I Spent My Day

Rabindranath Tagore 1861 (Kolkata) – 1941 (Kolkata)



I spent my day on the scorching
hot dust of the road.
Now, in the cool of the evening, I
knock at the door of the inn. It is
deserted and in ruins.
A grim ashath tree spreads its
hungry clutching roots through the
gaping fissures of the walls.
Days have been when wayfarers
came here to wash their weary feet.
They spread their mats in the
courtyard in the dim light of the
early moon, and sat and talked of
strange lands.
They woke refreshed in the morning
when birds made them glad, and
friendly flowers nodded their heads
at them from the wayside.
But no lighted lamp awaited me
when I came here.
The black smudges of smoke left by
many a forgotten evening lamp stare,
like blind eyes, from the wall.
Fireflies flit in the bush near the
dried-up pond, and bamboo branches
fling their shadows on the grass-
grown path.
I am the guest of no one at the end
of my day.
The long night is before me, and I
am tired.

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Submitted on May 13, 2011

Modified on March 05, 2023

53 sec read
138

Quick analysis:

Scheme ABCDEFGHDIGGJKALMNOPCQRGSTUVWCX
Closest metre Iambic trimeter
Characters 895
Words 179
Stanzas 1
Stanza Lengths 31

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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