The seventh poem of Rabindranath Tagore’s Gitanjali moves The poem numbered seven in Gitanjali is a small river moving toward the sea, each stanza placed so that silence and sense arrive together as if by careful arrangement, and the opening gives the listener the sense of an entering. It opens with the shed garments of display and asks only for the presence that listens, making absence itself a preparation. The speaker asks to sit down at another’s feet and thereby offers a deliberate humility; the posture is bodily and moral at once.
Adornment is presented as an impediment, a glitter that would drown the subtle voice the poem seeks to hear and answer because the smallest clink can make a gulf between two breaths which otherwise might meet. Trinkets would make a distance where intimacy is wanted and so the poem asks that they be laid aside. The act of laying aside therefore reads not as loss but rather as an offering of ear and heart.
The reed flute becomes the central emblem and brings the gestures into focus, since a flute without breath remains only hollow wood and cannot turn into voice by itself. To be made hollow is not to be ruined but to be readied to receive another breath and to give that breath onward as music. The image shows how receptivity and craft are bound together and how to be tuned and straight is to be prepared for shaping by wind.
A paradox lies at the poem’s heart in which emptiness proves the condition of plenitude, where renunciation of vanity produces a truer ornament even as it removes the outward shimmer. The poet must unlearn applause before a genuine voice can take root because the voice that demands is seldom the voice that listens. Art is imagined as translation rather than display and the plain reed proves the instrument most true to the work.
The lines themselves move with deliberate cadence in which modesty becomes an eloquent form of control and restraint appears as the highest artistry, for the poet’s economy of image is not poverty but precision. Craft becomes a moral habit through which sense is given room to breathe and to flower. The poem thus teaches by enactment rather than by sermon and its modesty is a test of artistic confidence.
The final entreaty gathers devotion and métier into a single aspiration as it asks to be made simple and straight like a reed for filling with music and it asks usefulness rather than praise. The plea is intimate and practical both at once and it asks the life that is to be emptied only that it might carry another breath. To be emptied of self is therefore to be prepared to carry another’s voice and to transmit that voice in plain service.
When one reads the poem in the light of a life devoted to both spiritual feeling and exacting craft the lines acquire a domestic authority that is at once mild and severe, and the habitual willingness to set aside trappings becomes a teaching about patience and the art of listening. The reed therefore becomes a small sacrament of usefulness and faithfulness, a symbol for the ordinary work of being open and true. In this demonstration Rabindranath Tagore shows how art and devotion may be reconciled in practice and how the simplest acts can carry great consequence.
The poem resonates in a register that links devotional practice to everyday craft, and it asks of its reader a steady attention such as habitually attends to liturgy and workshop in equal measure, for the life of prayer and the life of labour here are shown to be of a single cloth. The image asks for work that is humble and exact. We learn that humility is not mere passivity but an active discipline that tunes character as a musician tunes an instrument. Such lessons reach beyond any single spiritual tradition.
The poem asks for a life that will be useful rather than a life that must be admired, and that aspiration turns aesthetic simplicity into an ethic of service that makes the poem itself a modest manual for living. To be stripped of ornament is to be revealed to the unknown, and this revelation makes one ready for music.
Arup K. Chatterjee 