Tagore’s Song Offerings: Materialism Meets Mysticism

Rabindranath Tagore is a great poet who enriched the genre of mysticism in world literature and his Nobel winning work Song Offerings presents it extensively. There is no debate about the mystic journey we experience through the contents of this outstanding piece of literature, but what we overlooked massively all these years is the point of view of Tagore that is quite opposite to his mystic poems or songs. Whenever a reader peruses the poems of Song Offerings, he or she starts to evaluate Tagore just as a mystic, but overlooks his materialist being. There is a ‘Master’ or ‘Lord’ or a ‘Thou’ to whom Tagore surrenders himself, and all the offerings through the songs are made to ‘Him’. This ‘Lord’ is not the unseen God. Tagore believes that ‘life’ is the power that gives him the spirit to experience the beautiful world. The presence of materialism does, in no way, hamper to nourish mysticism of the poems. Song Offerings indeed is a mystical journey but the mysticism does not roam around the perceived God, but the material ‘life’. Tagore shows that if material ‘life’ is the circle, the centre of that circle is mysticism. Such an innovative and unique concept builds Song Offerings. This unrevealed part of Tagore, where material body gets a mystic heart, is going to be unleashed in this paper.