Rabindranath Tagore was a Bengali writer born in Calcutta, India. Tagore was a Nobel laureate for literature (1913), one of India's greatest poets and the composer of independent India's national anthem. Stray Birds contains 320 poems on nature, man, and his environment. They were written in Bengali before being translated into English by the poet himself. These short poems are often just a fleeting line or two, and similar to the haiku form, but their potent imagery make them stay in the mind.