Where the mind is without fear and the head is…

The lines open poem 35 of Gitanjali. Each clause of the poem begins with “Where”: 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”. The last line names the country the whole poem has been describing: “Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake.”

Tagore wrote the poem in Bengali at the beginning of the twentieth century, when India was under British rule, and made this English prose version himself. Gitanjali, or Song Offerings, appeared in London in 1912 with an introduction by W. B. Yeats, and the next year Tagore became the first non-European to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature.

In India the poem is recited in schools and quoted in public life as a prayer for the nation, and its opening line has become a motto of free thought.

Gitanjali, poem 35, 1912

Checked word for word in the work itself.

Read the passage in the work