CHAPTER VII
"GITANJALI" AND CHAITANYA DEVA
That sky there above us, O Zarathustra, seen from afar looks like a palace built of heavenly substance and shining over the earth; it is like a garment inlaid with stars.
A book of song whose pages are tinged with a light like the sky shown to Zarathustra, it was Gitanjali that won for its author his audience over here, and we still return to it as to a first love. Innocent, most of us, of what lay behind it in Indian poetry, we found in these "song-offerings," as the title is in English, an accent that was new to us, yet natural as our own hopes and fears. They took up our half-formed wishes and gave them a voice; they rose inevitably from the life, the imagination, and the desires of him who wrote. They were the vehicle of a great emotion that surprised its imagery not only in the light that was like music, the rhythm that was in the waves of sound itself and the light-waves of the sun; but in the rain, the wet road, the lonely house, the great wall that shuts in
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