The Symbol of the Sea in Rabindranath Tagore and Juan Ramón Jiménez

Abstract

Those of us who were born inland, deep inside the continent, have a fixed memory of the first time we saw the sea, the hugeness that goes beyond anything a child can ever imagine, the roaring that seems to want to share a secret which we shall never learn. One of the constants running through the oeuvre of Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941) is an allusion to the beaches of the Ganges, where the poet meditated and on which, as the laureate himself told the world in his speech of acceptance of the Swedish prize, he heard the “muse” that prompted him to compose his verses1. On the other hand, we also know, from his numerous trips to Europe and the United States, that he was acquainted with several oceans, in addition to the Indian one, owing to the many times he sailed their waves on his journeys. Over this course, he started to make out that other boundless, shoreless ocean of which he speaks to us. He does this, for instance, in his Gitanjali (Song Offerings), one of his key works, of which André Gide would say that Tagore was seeking God in a “coloured reflection” 2, thus pointing to the keen and vibrant spirituality of this extremely famous collection of poems, published in the bard’s own translation into English a year before he received the Nobel Prize. Here, he tells us in the poem ‘Ocean of Forms’