New Year, Tagore and Tennyson

                  New Year, Tagore and Tennyson

            What follows is one poem about New Year published in 1850 by English poet Lord Alfred Tennyson (1809-1892) and another poem included in Gitanjali (1913) by Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941).

              Both Tennyson and Tagore tell their readers about the obsolete and irrational social, political and moral evils which should vanish from their motherland in the time to come.

                The title of Tennyson’s poem is ‘RING OUR, WILD BELLS’: It reads as follows:

                         Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky,

                         The flying cloud, the frosty light:

                         The year is dying in the night;

                        Ring out, wild bells, and let him die.

                        Ring out the old, ring in the new,

                        Ring happy bells, across the snow

                        The year is going, let him go;

                        Ring out the false, ring in the true.

                        Ring out the grief that saps the mind,

For those that here we see no more; 

Ring out the feud of rich and poor,

Ring in redress to all mankind.

Ring out false pride and blood,

The civic slander and the spite;

Ring in the love of truth and right,

Ring in the common love of good.

Ring out old shapes of foul disease,

Ring out the narrowing lust of gold;

Ring out the thousand wars of old,

Ring in the thousand years of peace.

Ring in the valiant man and free,

The larger heart, the kindlier hand;

Ring out the darkness of the land,

Ring in the Christ that is to be.

Tagore’s poem has no title.  It is published at serial number 35 in the anthology of poems/songs entitled Gitanjali for which he was honoured with Nobel Prize for literature in 1913.  All the poems in Gitanjali are addressed to God by one who is closely related to Him as a beloved.      

                        Given below is the full text of the poem:

“WHERE the mind is without fear and the head is held high;

Where knowledge is free;

Where the world has not been broken up into fragments

by narrow domestic walls;

Where words come out from the depth of truth;

Where tireless striving stretches it arms towards perfection:

Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way into

the dreary desert sand of dead habit;

Where the mind is led forward by thee into ever-widening thought

and action----------

Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake. “

1^st January 2020                                     G.R.KANWAL