Old and New
Old and New - context Summary
Published in Gitanjali, 1912
This short lyric, published in the 1912 English edition of Gitanjali, presents a devotional meditation on divine presence that dissolves boundaries between familiar and strange. The speaker describes how knowing the divine turns strangers into friends, links life through birth and death, and opens doors previously closed. The poem frames personal unease and homesickness within a larger assurance that the one companion remains constant amid change.
Read Complete AnalysesThou hast made me known to friends whom I knew not. Thou hast given me seats in homes not my own. Thou hast brought the distant near and made a brother of the stranger. I am uneasy at heart when I have to leave my accustomed shelter; I forget that there abides the old in the new, and that there also thou abidest. Through birth and death, in this world or in others, wherever thou leadest me it is thou, the same, the one companion of my endless life who ever linkest my heart with bonds of joy to the unfamiliar. When one knows thee, then alien there is none, then no door is shut. Oh, grant me my prayer that I may never lose the bliss of the touch of the one in the play of many.
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