Stray Birds

Stray Birds contains ideas on nature man and his environment as may be entertained by a man sitting by a window where the stray birds of summer sing and fly away. These short sometimes merely one-line poems are often just an image or the distillation of a thought but they stay in the mind and do not fly away as easily as the birds. The author Rabindranath Tagore was a Nobel laureate for literature (1913) as well as one of Indias greatest poets and the composer of independent Indias national anthem as well as that of Bangladesh. He wrote successfully in all literary genres but was first and foremost a poet publishing more than 50 volumes of poetry. He was a Bengali writer who was born in Calcutta and later traveled around the world. He was knighted in 1915 but gave up his knighthood after the massacre of demonstrators in India in 1919.