This Be My Parting Word

The Quote

"When I go from hence let this be my parting word, that what I have seen is unsurpassable."

— Rabindranath Tagore, Gitanjali, Song 90 (the poet's own English rendering)

Original language: Bengali

Historical Context

Rabindranath Tagore wrote the poems of Gitanjali in Bengali and then translated them himself into the spare, luminous English that astonished the West when the book appeared in 1912. W.B. Yeats wrote the introduction; within a year Tagore had the Nobel Prize. The poems are devotional without being dogmatic — songs of a soul moving through love, loss, work, and worship toward the divine, with death woven through them as the completing note.

Song 90 belongs to the closing movement of the book, where the poet speaks of the end of life. It is a farewell poem — not of regret but of testimony. The poet asks that when he goes, his parting word be the declaration that what he has seen is unsurpassable.

Meaning

The poem is an act of summing-up. "When I go from hence" — the departure is acknowledged, without drama, as a fact of the journey. "Let this be my parting word" — the poet chooses, deliberately, what his last testimony will be. "That what I have seen is unsurpassable" — the content of the testimony is the goodness of the world: the beauty, the love, the work, the worship. The poem does not claim that nothing was hard; it claims that what was seen and loved was worth everything.

The following lines of the song expand the testimony: "I have tasted of the hidden honey of this lotus that expands on the ocean of light, and thus am I blessed." The poet has tasted the sweetness of existence itself — the "hidden honey" that is not obvious, that must be found — and the tasting is the blessing. Death, in this poem, is not the refutation of life's goodness but the occasion of its final affirmation.

Interpretation

The poem offers one of the purest expressions of what the philosophers call the attitude of gratitude toward existence. Where the analytic tradition asks whether death can be an evil, Tagore's poem takes the opposite direction: it asks what a life, fully lived and fully received, has to say at its end — and the answer is testimony, not complaint. The poem does not deny death; it does not need to. The life has been completed by its own appreciation.

The verse also carries the ancient wisdom of the ars moriendi — the art of dying — in a new form. The good death, on Tagore's account, is the death of the person who can say, honestly, that what they have seen is unsurpassable. This is not the naive optimism of the sheltered; it is the achievement of the soul that has learned to receive the world as gift. The poem is the prayer of a life that has practiced gratitude until gratitude became its nature.

The Parting Word as a Practice

Tagore's poem suggests a practice: to live in such a way that our parting word would be testimony rather than regret. The philosopher's version of this practice is the daily review — the Stoic evening accounting, the examination of the day — in which we notice what was given and what was received. The poem's version is simpler and deeper: it asks us to taste the honey now, so that the last word, whenever it comes, will be the truth we have been practicing all along.

Related Learning

• See Farewell wisdom for the art of saying goodbye well.
• Explore Gratitude wisdom for the practice of seeing life as a gift.
• Read Death wisdom for the tradition that lets mortality teach us to live.

Sources

1. Rabindranath Tagore, Gitanjali (Song Offerings), Song 90 (London: Macmillan, 1913). https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/7164
2. "Death." Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/death/
3. "Well-Being." Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/well-being/