The Gardener

The Gardener was first published in 1913 and was dedicated to
W.B. Yeats. It contains prose translations of eighty-five Bengali poems. Tagore’s idea was to present his poems written earlier than the Gitanjali period, poems free from religious symbolism and mystic emotions. The poems in this collection are simpler and more realistic, love being their main motif. The bulk of these poems came from Kshanika (1900) – a work distinguished by abundance, spontaneity, irony and sprightly metre. The Gardener also includes poems of much earlier works like Kadi O Kamal (1886), Manashi (1890) and Mayar Khela (1889).