Lover's Gift

This intimate song cycle for baritone or mezzo-soprano and piano draws on the lyrical depth of Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore’s poetry, weaving a meditation on love, longing, and the ephemeral nature of connection. The selected poems—“Come to my garden walk,” “Crossing 31,” and “Lover’s Gift 28”—evoke a dreamlike emotional landscape where joy and sorrow, presence and absence, the real and the imagined intermingle.

In music, as in Tagore’s verse, love is portrayed not as possession but as pursuit—fleeting, luminous, and always just beyond reach. The piano and voice together create an atmosphere of quiet yearning and sudden revelation, echoing the poet’s imagery of shivering dust, unseen shores, and the silent fire of the stars.

“Lover’s Gift” invites the listener to dwell in moments of wonder, where the heart’s deepest truths are felt not in what is said, but in what slips softly through silence.

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Text by Rabindranath Tagore

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Lover's Gift 2

COME TO MY garden walk, my love.

Pass by the fervid flowers that press themselves on your sight.

Pass them by, stopping at some chance joy, that like a sudden wonder of sunset illumines, yet eludes.

For love's gift is shy, it never tells its name, it flits across the shade, spreading a shiver of joy along the dust.

Overtake it or miss it for ever.

But a gift that can be grasped is merely a frail flower, or a lamp with a flame that will flicker.

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Crossing 31

ONLY A PORTION of my gift is in this world, the rest of it is in my dreams.

You, who ever elude my touch, come there in secret silence, hiding your lamp.

I shall know you by the thrill in the darkness, by the whisper of the unseen worlds, by the breath of the unknown shore;-

I shall know you by the sudden delight of my heart melting into sadness of tears.

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Lover's Gift 28

I DREAMT THAT she sat by my head, tenderly ruffling my hair with her fingers, playing the melody of her touch.

I looked at her face and struggled with my tears, till the agony of unspoken words burst my sleep like a bubble.

I sat up and saw the glow of the milky way above my window, like a world of silence on fire, and I wondered if at this moment she had a dream that rhymed with mine.

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