CHAPTER IV
"THE GARDENER"
O rose, what art thou to be compared with her bright face?
She is fresh, and thou art rough with thorns.—Hafiz.
Those of us who made our first acquaintance with Rabindranath through Gitanjali may, on turning to the pages of The Gardener, be deceived by an apparent likeness of rhythm and colour into thinking the poems of the same stock. But in reality they belong to another phase; they are the songs of his earlier manhood, drawn largely from three volumes, entitled Sonar Tari, Manasi, and Chitra. We lose much, it is said, of the charm of their original measures, because the English medium gives them a demurer, more serious air than that intrinsically belonging to them.
A fellow-countrywoman of their writer, herself a poet, said that to understand his hold over his Bengali readers, especially the younger generation, it was indispensable to read the songs of his youth in the original. Others have
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