Reading Tagore himself had nothing to do with it. The second is the inscription Wilfred Owen's mother found in her dead son's pocketbook: 'When I go from hence, let this be my parting word, that what I have seen is unsurpassable.' But I owe this knowledge to (a) a tourist guide in Agra, and (b) to a biography. The first is how he described the Taj Mahal: like 'a teardrop on the face of eternity'. In fact, I could remember one line clearly enough, and vaguely remember a whole stanza.

They skipped from Tacitus to Hippolyte Taine as if there was nothing in Tagore's collected works (28 thick books, even with his 2,500 songs published separately) that ever had stuck in anyone's mind, or was so pithily expressed that it deserved to as if what had come out of Tagore's pen was a kind of oriental ectoplasm, floating high above our materialist western heads, and ungraspable. I consulted two dictionaries of quotations, the Oxford and Penguin, to check the most memorable lines of this poet, novelist, essayist, song and short story writer.

In London, the BFI is hosting a season of films inspired by his work last night his fellow Bengali (and fellow Nobel laureate) Amartya Sen gave a talk at the British Museum a two-day conference at the University of London will, among other things, examine his legacy in the Netherlands, Poland and Germany. This weekend festivities and seminars are being held in his honour across the world. R abindranath Tagore was born 150 years ago today.

Rabindranath tagore song