would immediately brush it off with his hand or his wrist. In Rabindranath's writings you find infinite sympathy with the babe in trouble and the small boy at odds with authority. He understands the appetite of the growing thing and the greedy lips of the babe. He ends this very poem with one of the naïve recoils in which he often indulges in his verse. In this case the foibles of the elders are brought into range with the innocent iniquities of the children.
"Everybody knows," he cries to the child at odds, "how you love sweet things—is that why they call you greedy?… What then," he continues, "what then would they call us who love you?" The irony of this question is not fully seen until one detects that by it the filiolater is unmasked in his own love for the sweetness of the little rascal.
Again, in the song "When and Why" there is another reading of the babe's litany and the eternal philosophy of appetite and desire and delight. For, says the poet:
When I bring sweet things to your greedy hands, I know why there is honey in the cup of the flower, and why fruits are secretly filled with sweet juice;—when I bring sweet things to your greedy hands.
