Page:Rabindranath Tagore - A Biographical Study.djvu/37

 feeling of these songs is without a parallel in modern Indian poetry. "The singer indeed appears to be under the influence of a poetic henotheism, that is to say the entire universe assumes the hue of the poet's mood, while it lasts, giving rise to a kind of universal hallucination."

"The Songs of Sunrise," which came later, are in a braver key, and the themes are more auspiciously conceived,—"The Dream of the Universe," "The Eternity of Life," "Reunion with Nature," "Desideria," and "The Fountain awakened from its Dream." The second of these, with its three realms of Song, Love, and Life, is a remarkable poem, which (says Dr. Seal) just misses reaching the height of Goethe's "Three Reverences," or De Quincey's "Three Ladies of Sorrow." A companion poem, "The Eternity of Death," seizes the truth that life itself is realised through a series of changes or deaths, but strains the theme through too vague an emotional medium.

Of the place these lyrics hold in the neoromantic movement in India it is impossible for us over here to judge. They gained their effect by the sheer power, it seems, of an individual style in poetry which used elementary feelings and images