Symbols (symbolic words) in Tagore Poems

Rabindranath Tagore is a world-renowned Nobel Prize-winning Indian poet, mystic, philosopher, and writer. Tagore's poems can be studied from different aspects, especially in terms of literary schools. Tagore has been mostly influenced by Romanticism, but he also considered symbolism in his poetry. In this article, symbols in the categories of nature, plant, bird, object, human and human myth, place, animal, insect, etc. in Tagore's translated poems have been studied by employing descriptive, analytical, and quantitative methods. In general, out of 820 translated poems, symbols are seen in 155 poems (18.90) percent. Tagore was profoundly interested in nature; thus, symbols of nature (58%), plants (22.35%) and objects (22.25%) are the most frequent ones in his poems. The symbols of Tagore's poetry often have positive meanings and are mostly used to represent and describe human messages and ideas, mystical and philosophical concepts, and poetic images and are somehow similar to universal symbols.  Due to the fact that Tagore has rarely employed innovative or personal symbols, meanings of his symbols are easy to grasp.