Hemali AdhiyaRabindranath Tagore’s words have created history not just in India, but around the world. Coming from a country that uses one of his creations as the national anthem, makes me feel proud to read his other works that have been recognized around the world. I stumbled upon one of his love poems recently and its lines blew me away. Let’s take a look at his poem Unending Love by Rabindranath Tagore.
I seem to have loved you in numberless forms, numberless times…
In life after life, in age after age, forever.
My spellbound heart has made and remade the necklace of songs,
That you take as a gift, wear round your neck in your many forms,
In life after life, in age after age, forever.
The first stanza of Tagore’s love poem drifts one straight into his ideology of eternal love, where he speaks about being in love with his special someone since forever! Repetitions and rhymes work like a charm speaking volumes about how much they have fallen for one another.
Whenever I hear old chronicles of love, its age-old pain,
Its ancient tale of being apart or together.
As I stare on and on into the past, in the end you emerge,
Clad in the light of a pole-star piercing the darkness of time:
You become an image of what is remembered forever.
He continues to use the word ‘I’, thus implying to the lovers of the entire cosmos who experience the same emotions. Rabindranath Tagore’s reference to the love yarns and the comparison of the lover with a pole star are striking features of this stanza. In my assumption, it refers to the different phases of our lives, when we fall into and out of love, or it could mean how people leave eventually and are left only with memories.
You and I have floated here on the stream that brings from the fount.
At the heart of time, love of one for another.
We have played along side millions of lovers, shared in the same
Shy sweetness of meeting, the same distressful tears of farewell-
Old love but in shapes that renew and renew forever.
Rabindranath Tagore takes one into the depth of sentiments in Stanza three, where he connects the millions of lovers in this universe with the most colloquial emotions of love.
Today it is heaped at your feet, it has found its end in you
The love of all man’s days both past and forever:
Universal joy, universal sorrow, universal life.
The memories of all loves merging with this one love of ours –
And the songs of every poet past and forever.
The abundance of love expressed and its creation in this cosmos put together interwoven amidst the breathtaking lines in the last stanza put Rabindranath Tagore’s Unending Love amongst the best love poems of all times!
Read Love Poem: तेरी एक नज़र (Just One Look)- With Translation
