Nature in the friendship between a poet and a scientist

The paper attempts to look at Rabindranath’s ideas concerning nature and man’s relationship to it. For him, Nature ceases to be a mere backdrop of human actions, but, emerges as a living entity refurbishing him with some of the true renditions of life. The poet endorses nature in his childhood to escape into his alternative world of fantasy from the claustrophobic ambience of his school as well as the four walls of his confinement in the servants’ quarters, where the children of the Tagore household were raised. Later, when he was entrusted with the manifold duties of their estate at Shilaidaha, nature was sought as a refuge to sustain his poetic spirit amidst the tightly packed schedule of keeping accounts and collecting revenues. The poet’s communion with nature finds a more suitable expression as he finally decided to found his Ashram at Shantiniketan, a place where people could retreat from their life of unrest. Thus at different stages of his life, the poet manifests his conscious proximity to nature. This paper aims to trace the poet’s creative consciousness that articulates his perception of nature in his epistolary exchanges with the scientist Jagadish Chandra Bose.