Thursday, May 11, 2006

Tagore for our Time

I just came upon this poem by Rabindranath Tagore:

WHERE THE MIND IS WITHOUT FEAR

Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high;
Where knowledge is free;
Where the world has not been broken up into fragments by narrow domestic walls;
Where words come out from the depth of truth;
Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection;
Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way into the dreary desert sand of dead habit;
Where the mind is led forward by thee into ever-widening thought and action--
Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake.

[I can't get it to format correctly--after the first line, all the other lines should be indented.]

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