the paddy-fields. Nature changes very markedly from month to month. So the Varamasi, or description of the twelve months, is a chosen theme of the old Indian poets, as the early Shepherd's Kalender was with the English.
When you read Gitanjali or The Gardener you feel how well the poet has loved his region. It is nature's demesne, and with him as with Chandi Das or Nimai, nature is very near supernature. For the two zones cross in India as they do not in our western countries. It is much easier for the Hindu to pass the confines than for us who have shut out the supersensual and tried to make it seem absurd in the face of a civilisation whose end is creature-comfort. The feeling of the Bengal peasant for nature's moods may be seen in the folk-songs about her deities, such as Siva, who express her terror and beauty. To be sure, in the Indian mythology, Siva appears to lie beyond the sphere of pleasure and pain; the immovable amid the flux of things, eternity in the midst of time. But the country-folk of Bengal who love, like other peasants, to see things in the concrete, have not hesitated to bring him down into the paddy-fields and to their own village doors.
