"Ah, poet, the evening draws near; your hair is turning grey.
"Do you in your lonely musing hear the message of the hereafter?"
"It is evening," the poet said, "and I am listening because some one may call from the village, late though it be.
"I watch if young straying hearts meet together, and two pairs of eager eyes beg for music to break their silence and speak for them.
"Who is there to weave their passionate songs, if I sit on the shore of life and contemplate death and the beyond?"
There, as it were, the poet of the earth and the joy of earth replies to the Indian ascetic.
As to those readers who are not prepared to go back from the poet of Gitanjali to the writer of love-songs and the singer enamoured of the keen sensations of the earth, he would tell them as he did one dissatisfied soul, "Forgive me, if I too have been young!"
But in truth the more one looks into his poetry the more clearly one sees that the two poets of 1879 and of 1909 are one and the same at heart. The songs of divine love, set to Indian melody in the later book, are matched by the lyric interpretation of human love in the pages of The Gardener. Love's prodigal, in this romantic interlude, only spends himself that he may break out of the circle of the lower sensation
