The Song That Waits
The song that I came to sing remains unsung to this day. I have spent my days in stringing and in unstringing my instrument. The time has not come true, the words have not been rightly set; only there is the agony of wishing in my heart. The blossom has not opened; only the wind is sighing by. I have not seen his face, nor have I listened to his voice; only I have heard his gentle footsteps from the road before my house. The livelong day has passed in spreading his seat on the floor; but the lamp has not been lit and I cannot ask him into my house. I live in the hope of meeting with him; but this meeting is not yet.
, Gitanjali (1912)
There’s a particular frustration Tagore names here. Not the frustration of lacking tools or time, but the frustration of having everything ready and still finding the song unsung. The instrument strung and unstrung, the seat spread, the day spent in preparation. Still the song waits.
We live in a moment of unprecedented capability. Any creative work we can imagine seems more achievable than ever. The distance between conception and execution has never been shorter. Still, the “agony of wishing” Tagore describes persists. Perhaps intensifies. The song we came to sing waits somewhere beyond what we’ve managed to make.
This poem suggests that creative incompleteness might be less a problem to solve than a condition of being alive to possibility. “The blossom has not opened; only the wind is sighing by.” We feel the presence of what we haven’t yet made. We sense a visitor approaching who hasn’t arrived. This isn’t failure. It’s longing, which is different. Longing acknowledges that what we’re reaching toward exists somewhere, even if we haven’t touched it.
The instruments keep improving. The preparations grow more elaborate. But the gap between the work we’ve made and the work we sense we could make remains. Maybe that gap is where the creative life actually lives, not in the finished thing but in the perpetual reaching. Tagore doesn’t curse his unsung song. He lives “in the hope of meeting.” The meeting hasn’t happened yet. But hoping and preparing are themselves a form of devotion. Perhaps the most honest one.