Page:Rabindranath Tagore - A Biographical Study.djvu/61

 The Welsh poet, Dafydd ap Gwilym, when the Grey Brother turned upon him and showed him the perils that lay in love of woman, knew very well what to reply. He said in so many words that he had found his poet's paradise with one perfect daughter of summer in a birch grove: "Come with me to the birch-tree church, to share in the piety of the cuckoo amid the leaves, where we, with none to intrude on us, shall attain heaven in the green grove." The Indian poet replies to the monk, and says that the spring winds, driving the dust and the dead leaves away, are blowing away with them his monitions:

We should remember that in the Indian tradition the lyric symbolism of such poems is easily translated from what we may call the dialect of earth into the language of heaven. Dinesh Chandra Sen tells us how an old man inverted a love-song of Chandi Das: