Gitanjali by Rabindranath Tagore (1910)

W.B. Yeats carried the manuscript through London for days, reading it on trains and the tops of omnibuses, and kept having to close the pages lest a stranger see how much it had moved him. What moved him was a god who refuses to stay in the temple. _Gitanjali_ means song offerings, and across its hundred-odd prose-poems Tagore addresses the divine the way you might a lover who will not sit still to be held, finding it not behind the locked shrine but out on the road where the tiller breaks the ground, in the wind and the rain and the smell of the harvest. The voice is devotional and wholly intimate at once, petition sliding into love song, a joy so steady it cannot be told apart from longing. Tagore composed them in Bengali and rendered them into English himself, and they made him the first writer from Asia to take the Nobel. The poems do not advance so much as circle, returning again and again to the same threshold of meeting, until the circling itself becomes the prayer.