Tagore claims that the first time he experienced the thrill of poetry was when he encountered the children’s rhyme ‘’ (‘Rain falls / The leaf trembles') in Iswarchandra Vidyasagar’s Bengali primer (Introducing the Alphabet). There are at least two revealing things about this citation. The first is that, as Bengali scholars have remarked, Tagore’s memory, and predilection, lead him to misquote and rewrite the lines. The actual rhyme is in , or ‘high’ Bengali: ‘’ (‘Rain falleth / the leaf trembleth’). This is precisely the sort of diction that Tagore chose for the English , which, with its thees and thous, has so tried our patience. Yet, as a Bengali poet, Tagore’s instinct was to simplify, and to draw language closer to speech. The other reason the lines of the rhyme are noteworthy, especially with regard to Tagore, is – despite their deceptively logical progression – their non-consecutive character. ‘Rain falls’ and ‘the leaf trembles’ are two independent, stand-alone observations: they don’t necessarily have to follow each other. It’s a feature of poetry commented upon by William Empson in : that it’s a genre that can get away with seamlessly joining two lines which are linked, otherwise, tenuously.
Amit Chaudhuri