The Crescent Moon

Rabindranath Tagore · English

A 1913 lyrical collection of forty children's poems by Rabindranath Tagore, the Bengali poet who won the Nobel Prize in Literature that same year.

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Pagera Editor's Note

A 1913 lyrical collection of forty children's poems by Rabindranath Tagore, the Bengali poet who won the Nobel Prize in Literature that same year. Tagore self-translated these verses from his original Bengali "Shishu" (1903), shaping a tender vision of a child's world — paper boats drifting downriver, a champa flower hiding in the leaves, a mother humming through the rainy afternoon. The poems alternate between a child's wonder and a mother's lullaby, sketching the home as both intimate Bengal village and timeless lyric stage. Each piece is short, musical, and luminous, distilling Tagore's belief that the child sees what the grown world has forgotten.

Author

Rabindranath Tagore

Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941) was a Bengali polymath — poet, novelist, composer, philosopher, and reformer — who reshaped Bengali literature and music in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In 1913 he became the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, principally for his collection "Gitanjali." He composed thousands of songs (Rabindrasangeet), wrote the national anthems of India and Bangladesh, and founded Visva-Bharati University in 1921 as an experiment in cross-cultural humanist education. "The Crescent Moon" (1913), his self-translated children's verse, sits beside "Gitanjali" and "The Gardener" as part of the lyrical trilogy that introduced him to English readers.