Rabindranath Tagore: Face to Face

Day after day, O lord of my life, 
shall I stand before thee face to face. 
With folded hands, O lord of all worlds, 
shall I stand before thee face to face. 
.
Under thy great sky in solitude and silence, 
with humble heart shall I stand before thee face to face. 
.
In this laborious world of thine, tumultuous with toil 
and with struggle, among hurrying crowds 
shall I stand before thee face to face. 
.
And when my work shall be done in this world, 
O King of kings, alone and speechless 
shall I stand before thee face to face. 

Public Domain

Rabindranath Tagore (1861 – 1941) was a poet, musician, and artist who reshaped Bengali literature, music and art with his own version of Modernism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Author of the profoundly beautiful Gitanjali, a collection of his translations into English of traditional Bengali verses, he became in 1913 the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. Tagore’s poems are some of the most innovative and evocative of the Modern Age; however, his work remains largely unknown outside Bengal.