Page:Rabindranath Tagore - A Biographical Study.djvu/49

 grimness of death. Here, as in the real world, youth and age, life and death, are united, and the flower that blooms and the flower that fades appear on the same bough. In this embrace of life by death the Hindu devotee does not see anything to strike terror to his heart. He takes it as an expression of a law of nature and views it with a reverence to be traced in these songs. So every peasant, we are told, while hearing or singing songs about Siva and Uma, knows that Siva is above every earthly object: he is divine and immaculate and above all desire.

Through the legends of Siva and Kali, and the folk-songs and the Vaishnava songs, we discover the marked individuality of this region, in which poets sprang up like birds at a woodside. Song is a custom of the country. Its folk need music as they need rice. Even the snakes are put into songs; and in the story of that son of India who came cursed into the world, and was incarnated as a great hunter, we have a lovely lyric landscape, with cows and milkmaids, lit by the morning sun, as a setting for the scene where he finds the golden lizard.

There is one poet, Mukundarama, who describes Bengal with a certain realism and as