Thou hast made me endless by Rabindranath Tagore (Text & Summary)

Thou hast made me endless

by Rabindranath Tagore

(Text & Summary)

 

Thou hast made me endless

Thou hast made me endless, such is thy pleasure,

this frail vessel thou emptiest again and again,

and fillest it ever with fresh life.

This little flute of a reed thou hast carried over hills and dales,

and hast breathed through its melodies eternally new.

At the immortal touch of thy hands,

my little heart loses its limits in joy and gives birth to utterance ineffable.

thy infinite gifts come to me only on these very small hands of mine.

Ages pass, and still thou pourest, and still, there is room to fill

 

Summary

The poet begins this song in a spirit of humility. It is God’s will that the human soul is eternal and immortal. The human body is like a vessel that God empties repeatedly and then fills it again with fresh life. Man dies and takes birth in another form. In this way, human life is constantly renewed.

The poet compares his body to a flute made of reeds. God is the musician and He plays upon it, over the hills and in valleys. He always plays new and fresh melodies. The poet means to say that it is under divine inspiration that he can always sing fresh and new songs. As God is everywhere and in every object of Nature, he gets His inspiration everywhere and sings over hills and dales. Whenever God touches his soul with His immortal hand, and inspires him, he sings with immense joy, forgetting his own physical limitations. He loses his identity in his union with the Infinite. In this way, there takes place union of man and God; the eternal soul gets absorbed in Infinite.

God’s bounty is infinite. His gifts are numerous, and He has scattered them everywhere, but the human soul is too small to enjoy in total abundance and profusion of divine bliss. Again, the human soul is compared to a little child, whose hands are too small to hold the gifts his parents offer to him. God has been bestowing His gifts upon His people for ages, and still, His blessings are not exhausted. God’s gifts are endless, but man is not great and wise enough to make use of God’s gifts, which accounts for his poverty and wretchedness.

‘Thou Hast Made Me Endless’ poem deals with the God’s love and His gifts and the intimate relationship between Him and the Poet. The Poet shows how kind and generous God is to humankind. He has created this universe and scattered His innumerable blessings and gifts through the universe for the advantage of man. God wishes man to realize His greatness, vastness, and generosity, so that Poet may aspire to strengthen the bond of relationship with Him. He must make efforts to seek a union with God. Throughout his poetry, the poet speaks of divine inspiration. Poet sings in praise of God because God inspires him to do so. When he gets this inspiration, he forgets his physical limitations and feels an immense joy.

In this poem, the Poet has used concrete images drawn from everyday experiences. The body is first compared to a weak or a ‘frail vessel’ and soul to the water, filled in it. Next, God is presented as a flute player, and the human soul is compared to a flute of reed. In the Gitanjali, we may find this mingling of the concrete and the abstract from the beginning to the end. The epithets flute and ‘reed’ bring out the complete humility of the Poet. The Gitanjali is an offering of a song to the divine. The poem shows the Poet’s faith in the theory of reincarnation of souls after death:

The frail vessel thou emptiest again and again.