Why do you whisper so faintly in my ears, O Death, my Death?
would be faintly impressive if Walt Whitman had never lived.
Not only are Tagore's lines not great but some of his lines are foolish:
Under the banyan tree you were milking the cow with your hands, tender and fresh as butter.
Perhaps Mr. Tagore did not know that in English "butter fingers" greasily signifies manual ineptitude. I can not take that line seriously, nor understand how Tagore has become one of England's acknowledged poets. He distorts nature with pathetic fallacies which have not verbal splendor to carry them, as the verbal splendor of Shakespeare, Shelley, and Thompson often carries a metaphor that, so to speak, will not hold water.
I paced alone on the road across the field while the sunset was hiding its last gold like a miser.
The sunset is not in the least like a miser; and a true lover and observer of nature would not allow himself such a niggardly fallacious image. Are not our friends, the poets and critics, victims of the spell which odd things out of the East put on our occidental minds, the spell that makes some people run after queer preachers and philosophers who talk religion through their turbans?
One is reminded that Mr., or Sir Owen Seaman has in his delicious book of parodies, "The Battle of the Bays", an Edwin-Arnoldy thing that runs like this:
The bulbul hummeth like a book
Upon the pooh-pooh tree,