[1] Song Offerings is often identified as the English rendering of Gitanjali (Bengali: গীতাঞ্জলি), a volume of poetry by poet Rabindranath Tagore composed between 1904 and 1910 and published in 1910.

However, in fact, Song Offerings anthologizes also English translation of poems from his drama Achalayatan and nine other previously published volumes of Tagore poetry.

The deep-rooted spiritual essence of the volume is brought out from the following extract : My debts are large, my failures great, my shame secret and heavy; yet I come to ask for my good,

At the immortal touch of thy hands my little heart loses its limits in joy and gives birth to utterance ineffable.

He candidly informed the readers, "I have carried the manuscript of these translations about with me for days, reading it in railway trains, or on the top of omnibuses and in restaurants, and I have often had to close it lest some stranger would see how much it moved me.

These lyrics--which are in the original, my Indians tell me, full of subtlety of rhythm, of untranslatable delicacies of colour, of metrical invention—display in their thought a world I have dreamed of all my live long."

A tradition, where poetry and religion are the same thing, has passed through the centuries, gathering from learned and unlearned metaphor and emotion, and carried back again to the multitude the thought of the scholar and of the noble.

"[11] The Nobel Committee finally quoted from Song Offering and stated that Rabindranath in thought-impelling pictures, has shown how all things temporal are swallowed up in the eternal: Time is endless in thy hands, my lord.

82) In response to the announcement of the Nobel prize, Rabindranath sent a telegram saying, "I beg to convey to the Swedish Academy my grateful appreciation of the breadth of understanding which has brought the distant near, and has made a stranger a brother."

This was read out by Mr. Clive, the-then British Chargé d'Affaires (CDA) in Sweden, at the Nobel Banquet at Grand Hôtel, Stockholm, on 10 December 1913.