Bengali Verse

Rabindranath Tagore, first citizen of Calcutta, remarked at one point that his poetry was a gift to the Bengali people in the Bengali language.
How do you really translate poetry anyways? Corrupted verse aside, his poetry is lovely in English as well.

Infinite Love

It seems it’s you I have loved in a hundred forms, unending:
birth after birth, through the ages.
In many a form you have taken and swung around your neck the garland of songs my
heart has stitched in sweet enchantment;
birth after birth, through the ages.

As I listen to that old-time song of pain and primeval love –
the old, old tale of meeting and parting –
and as I gaze into the infinite past,
at last through the darkness of Time appears your form like the pole-star with memories eternally laden.

From the heart of Time without beginning, we two have floated down in a double stream of passion.
We two have lived in a million lovers,
in bashful smile of kissing and the tears of long partition,
tasting the same old love in forms for ever new.

And now that love of all the ages has met its last fulfillment in a heaped up offering at your feet.
In you are all the joys and anguish and all affections of the heart.
In a single love are blended the memories of all other passions,
and all the songs that poets have sung through the ages.

-Rabindranath Tagore, 1889