Gitanjali...

Im into poems, but I never was really interested in Gitanjali... somehow it never appealed to me... not that I had read it :P but it seemed like the only people who did read it were oldies and boring people... even most bengali patriots who swore by Tagore had not read it! :D
But I wondered what the hype was all about... I mean, the Nobel Prize, come on, must be something... so I bothered to go through it, and I liked some of the verses... here are three...

(the most obvious one, also my favourite) :

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;
Where the clear stream of reason
has not lost its way into the dreary desert sand of dead habit;
Where the mind is let forward by three into ever-widening thought and action-
Into that heaven of freedon, my Father, let my country awake.

Song Unsung

The song that I came to sing remains unsung to this day
I have spent my days in stringing and unstringing my instrument
The time has not come true, the words have not been rightly set;
only there is the agony of wishing in my heart
The blossom has not opened; only the wind is sighing by
I have not yet seen his face, nor have I listened to his voice;
only I have heard his gentle footsteps from the road before my house
The livelong day has passed in spreading his seat on the floor;
but the lamp has not been lit and I cannot ask him into my house
I live in the hope of meeting with him; but this meeting is not yet.

Lotus

On the day when the lotus bloomed, alas, my mind was straying, and I knew it not
My basket was empty and the flower remained unheeded
Only now and again a sadness fell upon me, and I started up from my dream and felt a sweet trace of a strange fragrance in the south wind.
That vague sweetness made my heart ache with longing and it seemed to me that it was the eager breath of the summer seeking for its completion.
I knew it not then that it was so near, that it was mine, and that this perfect sweetness had blossomed in the depth of my own heart.