To embrace today’s poetry, we have to sometimes reach back and embrace the lessons learned from poets of the past. Today, I am presenting a poem that I felt was right for our day and time. It comes at a moment when fear tries to consume our every being and we have to stop that from happening.

 

Poet Rabindranath Tagore (May 7, 1861 – August 7, 1941) was ahead of his time. He was a Bengali polymath, writer, playwright, composer, philosopher, social reformer, and painter. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Tagore reshaped Bengali literature and music, as well as, Indian art with Contextual Modernism.

 

As one of Tagore’s most anthologized poems, Where the Mind is Without Fear is the 35th poem of Gitanjali. This poem is an expression of the poet’s reflective spirit and contains a simple prayer for his country, the India of pre-independence times. I am just so intrigued by how relevant Tagore’s poem is today and how his words still speak to the world, our hearts, and our spirits.

 

Where the Mind is Without Fear

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 its arms towards perfection;
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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.

— Rabindranath Tagore

Source: “Where the Mind is Without Fear” by Rabindranath Tagore | From Behind the Pen