I Had Gone a Begging by Rabindranath Tagore is the fiftieth poem from his Nobel Prize winning collection, Gitanjali. Written in blank verse, this poem is the story of a beggar, who is the poet himself. Narrated in a first person account, the poet has directly addressed the poem to the King of King’s. He begins by giving voice to his initial selfish and greedy thoughts on seeing the arrival of the golden chariot and then moves on to describing his utter shock when the man alights from the chariot and spreads his hand in front of the beggar, asking him for alms. The irony of the situation both amuses and confuses the beggar, but gathering his wits, he gives one little grain of corn to the man.

When he goes back and sees that the little grain of corn has been replaced by an equivalent amount of gold, he is filled with remorse. He laments that had he had a heart as big as the man’s, he would have given away all his belongings to him. This is also when he realises that the man in the chariot was no commoner, but God himself. This incident incites a spiritual awakening within the poet as he realises that materialistic things lose all their value, when compared to the real riches, which are kindness, generosity and empathy.

Through this poem Tagore has brought into focus the increase in the importance that is endowed upon materialistic goods and how man is driven, not by love and compassion, but by miserly approach, greed and never ending demands. The beggar wished for all his problems to be solved by the charity of the man in the chariot, but without any consideration for the man in the chariot. He is willing to accept the man’s riches, but when it comes to giving him something, he is reluctant and miserly. Man has becomes such that he puts self above everything else.