Yearning of the Human Spirit: Rabindranath Tagore
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There is a quiet ache that lives beneath all our
certainties. It does not announce itself in the language of need, nor does it
demand to be satisfied. It lingers, soft and persistent, like a question we
cannot silence. That is yearning. Of our soul.
One place where this yearning can be
felt palpably is Rabindranath Tagore’s poetry. Let me confine examples to Gitanjali
since that’s the only hard copy left with me now.
Light, oh where is the light? Kindle it
with the burning fire of desire!
There is the lamp but
never a flicker of flame – is such thy fate, my heart? [27]
This is my prayer to thee, my lord –
strike, strike at the root of penury in my heart. [36]
This kind of yearning is not a lack.
It does not arise because something is missing – like success not achieved or
love not found. This yearning is about what we dimly remember. A sense that
life, as it appears before us, is not all that is. That there is something
more, vast and luminous, just beyond the reach of our ordinary days.
This is the longing of a flower to be
plucked and taken because its real place is elsewhere. “Pluck this little
flower and take it, delay not!” [6] The flower thinks its real place is on
the deity’s garland. Yet it is aware of its unworthiness to be there. So it
just yearns to be honoured “with a touch of pain from thy hand.”
There is infinite longing in Gitanjali’s
poems. But the poems do not cry out in desperation. They lean forward in
longing. The soul, Tagore seems to say, is not empty. It is full, but not yet
fulfilled. It waits, listens, stretches itself toward something infinite.
“Like a flute of reed for thee to
fill with music.” [7] Or like a veena whose strings are stretched
taut and waiting for the master musician.
The soul yearns to be tuned before it
can resonate with the infinite.
This is not the yearning of
possession, but of surrender. Not the hunger to acquire, but the desire to
dissolve into something greater than oneself.
“And give me the strength to
surrender my strength to thy will with love.” [36] The yearning here is a
tension within the soul that pulls it beyond itself. The infinite does not
yield to force, however. It asks for openness, for yielding, for vulnerability.
Total surrender.
To surrender one’s weakness is
simple, it costs nothing. But to surrender one’s strength – one’s ego, one’s
sense of control, one’s carefully built identity – requires a deep courage.
Yearning is a discipline. It is not
merely the ache for the infinite, but the willingness to be reshaped by it.
Just as the veena does not produce
music by tightening its strings, but by being tuned and then played, the human
spirit does not fulfil itself by clinging to its own strength. It fulfils
itself by yielding that strength to a greater rhythm.
The yearning is to be touched by the
infinite. And thus become the infinite.
Spirituality is that longing, I
believe. How can I become the divine? How can I become worthy of it?
There is humility in that movement, a
willingness to be changed rather than a desire to control.
It is here that one begins to notice
a dissonance in our own time.
What passes in the name of
religion today bears little resemblance to this inward tuning. The language of surrender
is replaced by the language of assertion. Instead of yielding the self, we
enlarge it – until belief itself becomes a badge, a boundary, even a weapon.
What have we lost in the process of
asserting our religious identity so vociferously, so self-assuredly?
The distortion of religion is not the
only casualty, but the silencing of that deeper, more fragile voice within us
is the real loss. The voice that does not seek to dominate or define, but
simply to reach, to receive, to be attuned.
PS. This post is a part of Blogchatter A2Z Challenge 2026
This series comes to an end tomorrow with Z for Zero.
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Those who are the most sure of their spirituality are just trying to convince themselves, I think.
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