The Gardener

Rabindranath Tagore translated these poems himself, determined that English readers hear the same music he heard in Bengali. The result is a collection unlike any other: love poems that ache without becoming cloying, that speak of desire without coarseness, that find the sacred in the simply human. The poems exist as dialogues, fragments of conversation between lovers, moments of longing exchanged in a garden that exists somewhere between the physical and the spiritual. The gardener tends to both flowers and feelings; the beloved is both present and impossibly distant. Tagore captures something universal about desire: its joy and its melancholy are not opposites but companions, two faces of the same longing. Nearly a century and a quarter later, these poems still possess the strange power to make readers feel less alone in their own unsayable desires.