rabindranath tagore – the poet who buried his wife, a daughter, his father and a son in five years, and kept writing and teaching straight through it.

role

bengali poet, nobel laureate, educator

known for

gitanjali (1910; english 1912)

in one line

keep doing the small daily work. meaning has a way of catching up.

save

the short version

born 1861 in calcutta into a big, gifted bengali family. died there in 1941, at 80. poet, songwriter, novelist, painter, school-founder. wrote india's national anthem and bangladesh's.

in 1901 he started a small open-air school at santiniketan — nature, art, no rote learning. it grew into visva-bharati university.

then five years: his wife mrinalini died in november 1902; his daughter renuka of tuberculosis in 1903, after he'd carried her in the mountains looking for air; his father in 1905; his youngest son samindranath of cholera in november 1907, aged 11.

he didn't close the school. he kept writing. the poems he wrote through and after those years became gitanjali (1910; his own english version 1912) — searching, emptying, offering. it won the 1913 nobel, the first to a non-european.

his line from those poems: 'my house is small and what once has gone from it can never be regained.' and then: 'oh, dip my emptied life into that ocean, plunge it into the deepest fullness.'

for when the point has drained out and you don't know why you'd get up — he's the one who got up anyway, taught the class, and wrote it down.

go deeper — their stories on the site

dip my emptied life

five years, four graves, one school that stayed open. what tagore did with an emptied life is written down in the poems that made him famous.

5 min read · opens right here ›

the full story

tagore isn't here for the fame — the nobel, the anthems, the beard on the poster. he's here for five years, and what he did in them.

he'd married mrinalini in 1883 (she was a child of about nine, as was the custom then; he was 22). five children. by 1901 he was in his forties, an established writer, and had started a small experimental school on his family's land at santiniketan, built against everything colonial schooling was: outdoors, art, freedom. then, in the middle of building it, the losses started.

mrinalini fell ill in 1902; the doctors never worked out what it was. she died in november, aged about 29, leaving him five children between six and sixteen. the next year his daughter renuka got tuberculosis; he took her to the himalayas hoping the air would help, carried her at times in his arms, tried to keep her cheerful, and wrote children's poems while she was dying. she died in september 1903. his father, the family's great patriarch, in january 1905. and in november 1907, five years almost to the day after his wife, his youngest, samindranath, of cholera, aged eleven. his eldest son said that one left their father lonelier than all the others.

he didn't stop. the school stayed open. and he wrote — the bengali gitanjali poems came substantially through and after those years, and they don't do triumph. they search, they empty, they offer. 'my house is small and what once has gone from it can never be regained.' 'oh, dip my emptied life into that ocean, plunge it into the deepest fullness.' emptiness as a starting point rather than a verdict. he translated them into english himself, loosely; the 1912 book won the 1913 nobel prize for literature — the first ever given outside europe. the recognition that made him world-famous came straight out of the emptiest years of his life.

afterwards: novels, thousands more poems and songs, paintings, thirty countries, and in 1921 the school became a university on the same land where his wife had lived. honest notes: gitanjali is his own free translation, so every quote is a translation. two lines everyone hangs on him — one about not limiting a child to your own learning, one about not crossing the sea by staring at the water — have no source in anything he wrote. not used here.