Love of Creation and Mysticism in Tagore's Gitanjali and Stray Birds

This paper is concerned with examining two of Tagore's collections of poems, Gitanjali and Stray Birds, from the perspective of the poet's love of nature and of God. The paper seeks to find a religious explanation for Tagore's perpetual praise of the natural world, a praise that he was able to connect dynamically to his love of God. The explanation given is that Tagore's repetition of nature motifs and his ability to link these motifs to a harmonious pursuit of the divine is rooted in an appreciation for cosmogony of the Rig Veda. The paper ends by addressing briefly how Tagore's naturalism, rooted in a tradition extending back to sacred text, leads the poet to a mystical expression of personality through his poems.