The Crescent Moon

Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941) was a Bengali poet and writer, as well as a musician. He wrote over 2,000 Songs, numerous short stories, novels, plays, essays, poetry and dance dramas. Among his songs are the national anthems of two countries—India and Bangladesh. Tagore was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913.

contents

Introduction

POEMS

The Home

On the Seashore

The Source

Baby’s Way

The Unheeded Pageant

Sleep-stealer

The Beginning

Baby’s World

When and Why

Defamation

The Judge

Playthings

The Astronomer

Clouds and Waves

The Champa Flower

Fairyland

The Land of the Exile

The Rainy Day

Paper Boats

The Sailor

The Further Bank

The Flower-school

The Merchant

Sympathy

Vocation

Superior

The Little Big Man

Twelve O’Clock

Authorship

The Wicked Postman

The Hero

The End

The Recall

The First Jasmines

The Banyan Tree

Benediction

The Gift

My Song

The Child Angel

The Last Bargain

STORIES

The Kabuliwalla

The Kingdom of Cards

My Lord, the Baby

The Parrot’s Training

The Home-coming

Master Mashai

introduction

The name Rabindranath Tagore usually conjures up an image of someone very serious. He is the revered poet and Nobel laureate. But those who have read him know that he also had a playful and humorous side. It was a tender, emotional side filled with laughter and wit. This came through best in some of his poetry for children. In his lifetime, Tagore wrote hundreds of poems and songs, many of which he set to music himself. He also wrote dance dramas and plays, apart from short stories, novels and essays. In this large body of work there are some poems and stories that he wrote for and about children, which have been brought together in this volume.

Each poem in The Crescent Moon evokes the tender love of a mother and her child. Sometimes the mother is the beautiful land all around, and sometimes she is very much a human mother, calling out to the crescent moon in the sky as she holds her child in her arms in the darkening night. Some poems are about the sweet sleep that plays on a baby’s eyes at night, and in another the mother wonders who stole sleep from her baby’s eyes. Was it the Sleep-stealer who lurks about near the pond in the evenings?

Tagore also wrote a number of stories with strong child characters. One of my favourites is Minnie, from the story ‘The Kabuliwalla’. Minnie is a smart, precocious child, and her unlikely friendship with the burly Afghan from Kabul is beautifully described. Perhaps since he surrounded himself with children of all ages, Tagore was able to get to the mind of a child and put down in his stories exactly how a child thinks, talks and reacts to the world.

The Tagore family was a large one and there were always children playing about, studying—or trying not to study! Tagore himself has written elsewhere of his disdain for all kinds of formal schooling. He quite hated the schools he was sent to; the rote learning that the children had to do, and the exams they had to write. For him, studying meant letting the mind roam free to imagine in order to truly understand what is being taught. He believed so strongly in this that he started his own school in Shantiniketan. His wife, Mrinalini, gave him much of her jewellery to sell in order to raise money for the school. At Shantiniketan he created the kind of school that perhaps even I would have been happy to go to! Here, classes were held out in the open, under trees, no one was punished, and there was no learning by memory. Children worked and studied according to their interests. They played games, did art and learnt all that is essential, without feeling school to be a burden. All these thoughts are shown very effectively in the story ‘The Parrot’s Learning’. What happens if you keep pumping words and concepts into students? Read the story and see!