When the gong sounds ten in the morning and I walk to school by our lane.

Every day I meet the hawker crying,

'Bangles, crystal bangles!'

There is nothing to hurry him on, there is no road he take, no place he must go to, no time when he must come home.

I wish I were a hawker, spending my day in the road, crying, 'Bangles, crystal bangles!'

When at four in the afternoon I come back from the school,

I can see through the gate of that house the gardener digging the ground.

He does what he likes with his spade, he soils his clothes with dust, nobody takes him to task if he gets baked in the sun or gets wet.

I wish I were a gardener digging away at the garden with nobody to stop me from digging.

Just as it gets dark in the evening and my mother sends me to bed,

I can see through my open window the watchman walking up and down.

The lane is dark and lonely, and the street-lamp stands like a giant with one red eye in its head.

The watchman swings his lantern and walks with his shadow at his side, and never once goes to bed in his life.

I wish were a watchman walking the streets all night, chasing the shadows with my lantern.

Rabindranath Tagore (1861 -1941) was an Indian writer, painter and musician. He the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize for literature in 1913. He denounced the British Raj and advocated independence from the British.

Gitanjali (Song Offerings), Gora (Fair-Faced) and Ghore Baire (The Home and the World) are his best known works. His compositions were chosen by two nations as national anthems which include India's Jana Gana Mana and Bangladesh's Amar Shonar Bangla.

Rabindranath Tagore was the first Indian to win a Nobel Prize. Find out more about the Indians who went on to win Nobel Prizes. Also, make a note of thew respective fields for which they won the prize.

Tagore won a Nobel Prize for his collection of poems Gitanjali. A poem can be defined as an expression of ideas in a vivid and imaginative manner, usually in a rhythmic pattern. Tagore often wrote in Bengali and translated his own poems into English. So while his Bengali poems would be in verse form, the English poems would often be a combination of prose and poetry, known as prose poetry. Vocation is an example of prose poetry.

Tagore had reservations against education being imparted within four walls. He firmly believed in open-air education. This resulted in the conception of Visva Bharati University in Santiniketan in West Bengal. His ideas are reflected in his poem Vocation, where a child longs for freedom from a routine life.

1. gong: heavy bell, circular in shape that makes a loud sound when rung
2. hawker: a vendor who moves from street to street selling goods
3. spade: a tool used for digging