Gitanjali - Free Audiobook

Gitanjali, meaning "song offering", is a collection of short devotional poems by the Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore. The English volume was published in London in 1912 with an introduction by W. B. Yeats. Tagore made the translations himself, rendering verse he had originally written in Bengali into rhythmic English prose and drawing on several of his earlier collections, not only the Bengali book of the same name.

The 103 numbered pieces are addressed, for the most part, to a divine presence the poet speaks to as friend, lord, lover and guest. They move through longing, waiting, joy and the acceptance of death, and they find that presence in ordinary scenes: rain on the fields, a lamp at dusk, a boat on the river, children playing on the seashore. There is no story, but the poems gather into a loose arc from the poet's sense of separation toward a hoped-for meeting.

The book made Tagore famous in the West almost overnight, and in 1913 he became the first non-European to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature. It remains one of the best-known works of modern Indian literature. Readers drawn to spiritual poetry, to the mystical traditions of India, or to quiet, meditative writing that can be taken a few pages at a time will find it rewarding.