Serendip is an independent site partnering with faculty at multiple colleges and universities around the world. Happy exploring!
"Stray Birds"--Warm, beautiful poems
I have been wondering why we haven't encountered much poetry in class. Rabindranath Tagore is my favourite poet, and he wrote beautiful words such as "We live in this world when we love it"
(For more about short poems in Stray Birds: <http://www.poetseers.org/nobel-prize-for-literature/tagore/stray/>.)
I encountered a small book called "Stray Birds" when I was in junior middle school. One of the main reasons that I like many his poems is that he merged emotions into nature and vice versa in such a smooth way that there were no such conflicts, arguments, but plain feeling of peace and being surrounded by love. His words are immortal, because he talks about the eternal universe. When he looked at something and described it, he did so with such appreciation, and respect.
His attitude to readers was also different from that of any authors of our in-class material(--I am not "complaining" because we do need to do lots of work on academic writing)--He was teaching you something, but not with the strong feeling of having to tell the reader "listen to me, I am right! I am the authority!",or with a list of scientific facts--he simply told short stories in his poems, but making readers feel that your imagination has just began to float when the story ended. His gentle, warm words about nature could for many times release me somehow for tense academic readings.