Gitanjali – Song Offerings is the magnum opus of Rabindranath Tagore and the work that gave him the Nobel Prize. This is the English translation, Tagore wrote in Bengali and translated to English himself. The book consists of 103 poems rooted in the ancient spiritual wisdom of India. Most of the poems found in Gitanjali are prayers written when Rabindranath Tagore experienced difficult times, he lost both his father, wife, a daughter and a son in a short time. This pain and deep devotion to God are captured in the moving prose-verses of Gitanjali, which Tagore dedicated as “Song Offerings”. One of the most cited verses is Where the mind is without fear:
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 led forward by thee into ever-widening thought and action —
Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake.
