If you shed tears when you miss the sun, you also miss the stars.
Rabindranath Tagore · Stray Birds
Comfort & remembrance
“If you shed tears when you miss the sun, you also miss the…”
- Author
- Rabindranath Tagore
- Work
- Stray Birds
- Year
- 1916
- Length
- 14 words
- Source
- Project Gutenberg eBook #6524
Public domain. This passage is in the public domain. Rabindranath Tagore died in 1941, more than 70 years ago, and the work was first published in 1916. You can copy, print, read aloud or sell it without asking permission; a credit is kind but not required. The text is copied word for word from the Project Gutenberg edition linked here.
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Let life be beautiful like summer flowers and death like autumn leaves.
Death belongs to life as birth does. The walk is in the raising of the foot as in the laying of it down.
Our revels now are ended. These our actors,As I foretold you, were all spirits andAre melted into air, into thin air:And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,The cloud-capp’d towers, the gorgeous palaces,The solemn temples, the great globe itself,Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuffAs dreams are made on, and our little lifeIs rounded with a sleep.
Death, be not proud, though some have callèd theeMighty and dreadful, for thou art not so:For those whom thou think’st thou dost overthrowDie not, poor Death; nor yet canst thou kill me.From Rest and Sleep, which but thy picture be,Much pleasure, then from thee much more must flow;And soonest our best men with thee do go—Rest of their bones and souls’ delivery!Thou’rt slave to fate, chance, kings, and desperate men,And dost with poison, war, and sickness dwell;And poppy or charms can make us sleep as wellAnd better than thy stroke. Why swell’st thou then?One short sleep past, we wake eternally,And Death shall be no more: Death, thou shalt die!
I have been bent and broken, but—I hope—into a better shape.
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