Tagore, Japan and the Stray Birds of Summer

Mid-week poetic interlude

Hola Folks,

Since you have had the great sense (and generosity) to support The Global Jigsaw by subscribing, I will be sending you the gift of poems, mid-week, every week.

Last Tuesday we began with some haiku by Basho and Isa, my two favourites amongst the Japanese masters.

This week, I’ll introduce you to a few haiku-like poems, by Rabindranath Tagore, Asia’s first Nobel laureate, a prize he won in 1913 for literature.

Tagore was both enamored of Japan and wary of its more nationalistic tendencies. During his maiden voyage to the archipelago in 1916 he’d expressed an increasing discomfort with Japan’s drift towards belligerent nationalism. At a celebrated speech at Keio University in Tokyo he’d warned against imitating Europe’s tendency to “imbue the minds of a whole people with an abnormal vanity of its own superiority, to teach it to take pride in its moral callousness and ill-begotten wealth…”.[1]