Rabindranath Tagore’s Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech Essay

I was an obscure mortal in those days. My name was hardly hunch outside my own province, but I was quite content with that obscurity, which protected me from the rarity of crowds. And then came a time when my nucleus felt a longing to enumerate out of that solitude and do rough work for my fellow bes, and not hardly translate shape to my dreams and meditate profoundly on the problems of lifetime, but try to give expression to my ideas through some explicit work, definitive service.The one thing, the one work, which came to my mental capacity was to teach children. It was not because I was especially suited for this work of teaching, for I halt not had myself the intact benefit of a regular education. For some time I hesitated, but I felt that as I had a deep heat for nature, I had naturally love for children also. My bearing in starting this institution, Shanti Niketan, was to give children full license of blessedness, of life and of communion with nature. I mysel f had suffered when I was young, the impediments which were inflicted upon most boys at enlighten and I have had to go through the machine of education which crushes the comfort and freedom of life for which children have such unsatiable thirst. My objective was to give freedom and jubilate to children.So, I had a few boys approximately me, and I taught them, and I tried to rent them happy as their playmate and companion. I shared their life, and I felt that I was the biggest child of the party. And we all grew up in concert in this atmosphere of freedom.The vigour and joy of children, their chats and songs filled the air with a tactile property of delight, which I drank every day I was there. In the evening, at sunset, I oftentimes apply to sit alone, watching the trees of the shadow avenue and in the silence of the afternoon, I could hear distinctly voices of children in the air, and it seemed to me that these shouts and songs and sprightly voices were like those trees, which come out from the breast of the earth like fountains of life towards the heart and soul of the infinite sky. And it symbolised, it brought before my mind, the whole telephone call of hu homo life all expressions of joy and aspirations of men rising from the heart of existence up to this sky. I knew that we also, the grown-up children, send up our cries of aspiration to the Infinite.In this atmosphere, I used to write my poems Gitanjali, and I sang them to myself at midnight under the glorious stars. In the early(a) morning and afternoon glow of sunset, I used to write these songs till a day came when I felt impel to come out once over again and meet the heart of the large world.I could see that my coming out from the seclusion of life among these joyful children and doing my service was hardly a prelude to my pilgrimage to a larger world. I felt a great desire to come in touch with people of the westmost, for I was advised that the present age belongs to the Wester n man with his superabundance of energy.I felt that I must, before I die, come to the West and meet the man of the secret enclose where the Divine presence has his dwelling, his temple. And I thought that the Divine man with all his powers and aspirations of life is dwelling in the West. And so I came out. After Gitanjali had been written in Bengali, I translated those poems into English, without having any desire to have them published, being diffident of my mastery of that language, but I had the manuscript with me when I came out to the West. And you know that the British public, when these poems were put before them, and those who had the luck of reading them in manuscript before, clear of them. I was accepted, and the heart of the West opened without delay.