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60 | Introduction

It is not known to any certain degree when and where Rabindranath Tagore published the Bengali version of the poem known as “60.” This title is derived from the poem’s numerical placement in his English translation of Gitanjali, which was first published in England in 1912. This English volume, although it shares the name of one of Tagore’s earlier volumes of Bengali verse, is actually comprised of poems from several of Tagore’s previous volumes of Bengali poetry. As a result, scholars have been unable to trace the origins of most of the poems in the English Gitanjali. In addition, Tagore heavily altered the structure and, in some cases, the content of the poems when he translated them into English. Because of this, it is appropriate to use the year 1912 for the purpose of dating the poem’s creation.

The English Gitanjali was a landmark event that happened almost by accident. Tagore translated a group of his poems into English to pass the time while he was sick, then showed his translations to some influential English writers and editors, including William Rothenstein and William Butler Yeats—both of whom helped to publish and promote the English Gitanjali. A year later, Tagore made history by becoming the first Asian to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. Westerners were initially enamored of Tagore’s poems for their peaceful, mystical qualities, which contrasted sharply with a world on the verge of a harsh, global war. “60,” which features children playing on a universal seashore, contrasts metaphysical and religious ideas with the human world to demonstrate the blissful ignorance of children, who do not know about the adult world. The poem also emphasizes the idea of unity, underscoring Tagore’s lifelong goal to unite Eastern and Western traditions—a challenge at the time in British-controlled India. Generally speaking, Bengali readers know Tagore for his body of work, while many Westerners still associate Tagore only with Gitanjali. A current copy of Tagore’s “60” can be found in the latest paperback English edition of Gitanjali, which was published by Scribner Poetry in 1997.

60 Summary

Paragraph 1
Tagore’s “60” is a prose poem, so it uses paragraphs in place of poetic stanzas. The first paragraph begins with the line: “On the seashore of endless worlds children meet.” Based on the phrase “endless worlds,” one can see that this poem may have some metaphysical, or supernatural, qualities. The idea of endless worlds suggests a universal or infinite quality of some sort. In addition, Tagore introduces the image of a seashore in this sentence. He could be talking about an actual seashore, but the metaphysical context suggests that Tagore is talking about a symbolic one. A symbol is a physical object, action, or gesture that also represents an abstract concept, without losing its original identity. Symbols appear in literature in one of two ways. They can be local symbols, meaning that their symbolism is only relevant within the context of a specific literary work. They can also be universal symbols, meaning that their significance is based on traditional associations that are widely recognized, regardless of context. In “60,” the symbols are universal. Tagore is talking about a seashore, which is the opposite of the sea. The sea traditionally represents infinity—an idea that Tagore has already suggested with “endless worlds.” Following this line of thinking, the opposite of infinity, or heaven, is the mortal, human world. So, the seashore could represent this human world.

The next line addresses the idea of infinity directly: “The infinite sky is motionless overhead and the restless water is boisterous.” Once again, Tagore could be simply describing a day at the beach, where children meet on the beach, the sky is calm, and the sea is choppy. The next line—“On the seashore of endless worlds the children meet with shouts and dances.”—certainly supports this idea of children playing by the sea. This line also repeats part of the first line, so that the paragraph is bookended by the same image—a technique that Tagore uses throughout the poem. However, looking at the poem symbolically, one can find significance in many of the images. First of all, besides the idea that the sea represents infinity, water in general is a symbol for life or creation, in a feminine sense. Likewise, the “infinite sky” traditionally symbolizes heaven, and is often associated more generally with the male forces of creation. So, taken together, the sky and sea represent male and female creation forces. Next to these two cosmic forces, the seashore, representing the human world, seems almost insignificant, except for the presence of the children.

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