living far away from their parents. What Edward Thompson wrote in 1923 is true even today. But the Śākta poems are a different matter. These have gone to the heart of a people as few poets' work has done. Such songs as the exquisite 'This day will surely pass, Mother, this day will pass,' I have heard from coolies on the road or workers in the paddy fields; I have heard it by broad rivers at sunset, when the parrots were flying to roost and the village folk thronging from marketing to the ferry. Once I asked the top class in a mofussil high school to write out a song of Rabindranath Tagore's; two boys out of forty succeeded, a result which I consider showed the very real diffusion of his songs. But, when I asked for a song of Rāmprasād's, every boy except two responded. Truly, a poet who is known both by work and name to boys between fourteen and eighteen, is a national poet. Tagore's songs are heard in Calcutta streets, and have been widely spread by the student community and the Brahmo Samaj; but in the villages of Bengal they are unknown, while Rāmprasād's are heard everywhere. 'The peasants and the paṇḍits enjoy his songs equally. They draw solace from them in the hour of despair and even at the moment of death. The dying man brought to the banks of the Ganges asks his companions to sing Rāmprasādī songs. Shayama sangeet become more popular at the time of Sri Ramkrishna Paramahansa, who was an ardent Kali bhakta/devotee. Ramprasad Sen, Rabindranath Thakur/Tagore, Girishchandra Ghosh, and Swami Vivekananda, among others, composed numerous Shyama Sangeet. India's national song, 'Vande Maataram'/'Hail to the Mother', whose lyrics were written by Bankimchandra Chatterjee/Chattopadhyay and whose music was composed by Thakur/TagOre, is first and foremost a hymn to Ma Durga which hails the Indian motherland, "Bharat Mata", as being a form of the supreme goddess Durga. Rabindranath Thakur/Tagore's 'Jana Gana Mana', the Indian national anthem, contains a line, "Snehamayee tumi mata", which literally means India is a loving mother ("Bharat mata")... Rabindranath Thakur/Tagore also composed a song which was later picked to be the national anthem of Bangladesh ('Amar Sonar Bangla'/'My golden Bengal') in which he refers to the entirety of Bengal (undivided Bengal; the song was written before the partition of West Bengal and Bangladesh) as being a segment of the