During his lifetime, Tagore’s home province of Bengal was marked by social unrest and protest British rule. Tagore opposed the British partition of Bengal in 1905, aimed at weakening the rising nationalist movement, and wrote a cycle of patriotic poems which became the rallying cry for uprisings across the province. He cultivated a lifelong friendship with Mohandas Gandhi but differed from Gandhi on his methods for achieving independence and instead advocated for education as a vehicle for progress. Tagore established and ran a non-traditional school at Shantiniketan, Bengal (now Visva-Bharati University), where classes were held under trees and in the fields. In his later life, Tagore promoted ideals of humanist universalism over nationalism, militarism and imperialism in his writings and lectures across the world.  

In 1912, after losing his father, wife and two of his young children, Tagore travelled to London and published a self-translated book of devotional poems, Gitanjali, to instant acclaim. Gitanjali found admirers among WB Yeats and Ezra Pound, and was followed in 1913 by The Crescent Moon, a book of prose poems focused on children and childhood. Interestingly, lyric forms Tagore adopted for his English translations do not always match the poems’ formal structures in his original Bengali. Forms favoured by Tagore span the traditional Bengali payār couplet (two lines of fourteen syllables each), blank verse, sonnets, irregular couplets and later, free verse. Tagore would go on to publish over fifty volumes of poetry over his lifetime and even dictated a final poem on his deathbed.  His prolific output has helped solidify Bengali literature as an independent tradition rather than being read as a dependent offspring of Sanskrit literature.  

Several poems in The Crescent Moon, celebrates the purity of the mother-child bond, including The Beginning, in which the child poses a question familiar to all parents, “Where have I come from?” The mother’s answers are lush with imagery and a sense of oneness with nature: “When in girlhood, my heart was opening its petals, you hovered as a fragrance about it.” The mother goes on to describe: “Your tender softness bloomed in my limbs, like a glow in the sky before sunrise.” A child is not just born from a mother, the poem seems to say, but is also born from the wonder and mystery of the natural world. Here we can hear Tagore’s warm, melodic voice chanting The Beginning as if he is casting a spell of rapture on us across space and time.