Page:Rabindranath Tagore - A Biographical Study.djvu/96

 out of her long experience what is to be done to propitiate the deity, as in another page we saw how the birth-god wrote the words of fate on the babe's forehead.

The secret of Rabindranath's understanding of the child lies very near the secret of his whole art as a poet. In his poetry he brings the innocence of a child's mind to play upon life, love and death, and the phenomena of nature. He knows that the figurative delight of the child points the mode of representing the wonder of the earth that philosophy finds it so hard to reduce to order.

How figurative, how concrete, the Indian mode has always tended to be we can learn by turning up a page of the Upanishads. The father, in teaching the boy how to get at the subtile essence of the greater self, tells him to bring the fruit of the Nyagrodha tree: