Page:Rabindranath Tagore - A Biographical Study.djvu/57

 ordinary English lyric; but the actual tune makes light of the lines and rhyme pauses which an English musician would emphasise in setting his song. The Indian minstrel enhances one line or phrase, softens another by a fine diminuendo, and then by an aerial turn of the vocal melody gives a delightful waywardness to the next stave.

The influence upon Rabindranath's verse of the old Vaishnava poets has already been noticed. One of his Indian biographers tells us that two master-influences helped to decide the bent of his mind: the one he owed to his father, the other to the Vaishnava poetry. It was the spirit as well as the letter and congenial forms of that poetry that helped to mould his poetic character. In essence a poetry of revolt, it was in sympathy with all that was best in the folk-life of the country invoking a religion that tended to break down the academic tradition in literature and helped to break in actual life the law of caste. "The Vaishnavas," says Dinesh Chandra, "infused new life into the literature and the spirit of the age, just when the vitality of the Hindoo race was threatening to sink."