Let Me Awake (SATB) by Mickey McGroarty, text by Rabindranath Tagore

The 35th poem of Gitanjali, a collection of “song offerings” for which Rabindranath Tagore won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1913, the text of this piece is a prayer for freedom written in a time when India was ruled by the British. Tagore was a vocal supporter of freedom and critical of Britain’s rule, most notably when he renounced his knighthood in 1919 in protest against the Jallianwala Bagh massacre.

My setting of this great poem comes during a time when intellectual freedom is under threat in the United States, with an administration that considers thought and opinion sufficient grounds for deportation of legal students. The poem imagines a utopia without fear of persecution for ideals and expression and the speaker begs to awaken into that world. I find myself begging for the same.

Near the end of the poem, Tagore addresses a being he calls “my Father.” He is not necessarily addressing the God of Christianity, Hinduism, or Islam, all of which had an impact on his religious life, but a God personal to himself. When asked about his belief system, he said “I do not belong to any religious sect nor do I subscribe to any particular creed. This I know that the moment my God created me He has made Himself mine. He is ever active in the unfolding of my being through the experiences of life and in the unfolding of it with the various forces and beauties of this world. The very fact of my existence carries with it an eternal guarantee of love.”

Text:

Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high
Where knowledge is free
Where the world has not been broken up into fragments
By narrow domestic walls
Where words come out from the depth of truth
Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection
Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way
Into the dreary desert sand of dead habit
Where the mind is led forward by thee
Into ever-widening thought and action
Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake.

I have altered the text very slightly to add to the final notion “let my country awake” the subjects “me,” “my friends,” and “my family” to add a more personal element to the plea, as well as the word “please."

Soprano: Hannah Lebo
Alto: Amy Hogue
Tenor: Mickey McGroarty
Bass: Matthew Britton