Gitanjali by Rabindranath Tagore, 2nd British ed.

Gitanjali (Song Offerings), Rabindranath Tagore. Macmillan, London, 1913. Second British edition. First edition (1912) was a limited edition by the India Society. Introduction by the famous Irish poet and writer W. B. [William Butler] Yeats. Very good hardcover, no dustjacket. Blue cloth cover, with bright gilt lettering and wear along all edges and corners. Deckled page edges. Lightly tanned, unmarked pages. Tanned end papers, presumably from the dustjacket flaps, with former owner’s signature on the front free end paper.

Tagore won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1913, the same year the British edition of Gitanjali was published. Paramahansa Yogananda met Tagore soon after he received the award, and later visited him at his school, Shantiniketan, where they compared notes on their respective schools. Sri Yogananda sang Tagore’s songs as a boy and included in his Cosmic Chants the words and music of Tagore’s song “Thou Art My Life,” and the words of “Who Is in My Temple” and “Light the Lamp of Thy Love.” Yoganandaji wrote the following in Autobiography of a Yogi, which includes the last lines of the second of the “Song Offerings”: “The beauty of his lines, to me, lies in his art of referring to God in nearly every stanza, yet seldom mentioning the sacred Name. ‘Drunk with the bliss of singing,’ he wrote, ‘I forget myself and call Thee friend who art my Lord.'” He also quotes Tagore, referring to him as the “sage-poet,” in The Second Coming of Christ: “Have you not heard His silent steps? He comes, comes, ever comes.”