the universe seemed lost, it would not really be lost.… I knew now what Death was. It was perfection—nothing lost!"
With Gitanjali we are within reach of his second visit to the west. He has recognised that his setting sail on this later voyage to England and America was to make a change in his outlook. "As I crossed the Atlantic and spent on board ship the beginning of the new year," he wrote in a letter at the time, "I realised that a new stage in my life had come, the stage of a voyager." And this voyage again was associated inevitably with constructive social ideas and the work at Shanti Niketan, designed to aid in the building up of a Golden Bengal and the hope of the new Indies.
With most of us, at such a pause in our lives, the search for reality ends in our adjusting ourselves more or less comfortably to the work-a-day world. We test our relative effect by money, position, and the good opinion of the community; and at middle-age settle into our hole, and accept paper-solutions of the problems of our time. It is different with those who can renew their youth, and gain a fresh access of power at the very barriers of middle age. Such was the reinforcement that occurred to this poet who came out of his
