Gitanjali: Songs Offerings (63)

Thou has made me known to friends whom I knew not.
Thou hast given me seats in homes not my own.
Thou hast brought the distant near and
made a brother of the stranger.

I am uneasy at heart when I have to leave
my unaccustomed shelter; I forget that there abides
the old in the new and that there also thou abidest.

Through birth and death, in this world or in others,
wherever thou leadest me it is thou, the same,
the one companion of my endless life
who ever linkest my heart with bonds of joy to the unfamiliar.


When one knows thee, then alien there is none,
then no door is shut. Oh, grant me my prayer
that I may never lose the bliss of the touch
of the one in the play of the many.


Rabindranath Tagore