Why do you whisper so faintly in my ears, O Death, my Death?
would be faintly impressive if Walt Whitman had never lived.
Not only are Tagore's lines not great but some of his lines are foolish:
Under the banyan tree you were milking the cow with your hands, tender and fresh as butter.
Perhaps Mr. Tagore did not know that in English "butter fingers" greasily signifies manual ineptitude. I can not take that line seriously, nor understand how Tagore has become one of England's acknowledged poets. He distorts nature with pathetic fallacies which have not verbal splendor to carry them, as the verbal splendor of Shakespeare, Shelley, and Thompson often carries a metaphor that, so to speak, will not hold water.
I paced alone on the road across the field while the sunset was hiding its last gold like a miser.
The sunset is not in the least like a miser; and a true lover and observer of nature would not allow himself such a niggardly fallacious image. Are not our friends, the poets and critics, victims of the spell which odd things out of the East put on our occidental minds, the spell that makes some people run after queer preachers and philosophers who talk religion through their turbans?
One is reminded that Mr., or Sir Owen Seaman has in his delicious book of parodies, "The Battle of the Bays", an Edwin-Arnoldy thing that runs like this:
The bulbul hummeth like a book Upon the pooh-pooh tree, And now and then he takes a look At you and me, At me and you. Kuchi! Kuchoo!
It is, I confess, sheer perversity that made that stanza come into my head while I was reading Tagore. Tagore does not rhyme; he puts his verses into simple prose, most of which is pleasant enough, but none of which is rich in thought or magnificent in phrase.
Tagore is a faker in the English sense of the word. I do not know what he is in Hindoo. He gives lectures in America to audiences that are, of course, mostly women. Then when he has got all the money he can get from them (for his schools; he is not selfish) he tells them as a Parthian shot that they are idle. If they were not, the poor ignorant dears, he would not have had any audiences or any money. It is caddish to kick the cow that gives the milk. I should rejoice if he took millions from the idle ladies of America to help the ladies of India and to free India from the British murderer and thief. Spoiling the Egyptians is a good game. But it is not playing the game like a man and a philosopher to bite the hand that feeds you.