Critical Appreciation of Jibanananda Das’s Poem “Horse” (Ghora).

“Standing before Time, we must bear witness/ To what we have done and what we have thought.”—Jibanananda Das.

Trying to figure out the nature of Time, Saint Augustine in his The Confessions wonders “What then is time?” before going on to confirm time’s enigmatic entity by himself responding “If no one asks me, I know what it is. If I wish to explain it to one who asks, I do not know.” Jibanananda Das does not pose any conceptual question in his poems about time as such; not because he was never a spiritual person, but perhaps questions about time have lost their fascination for twentieth century man. Unlike poems from his collection Rupashi Bangla (Beautiful Bengal) in which Jibanananda Das is seen to transubstantiate and universalise Bengal into an ideal of the homeland that is acultural, ahistoric and atemporal much like a utopian fiction, in the poem “Horse” (Ghora), published in his 1948 collection The Darkness of Seven Stars, his idyllic setting of Bengal like other parts of the world is largely pervaded with melancholy and angst owing to time’s enigmatic entity caused by a so-called model of progressive transition from a “pre-modern” or “traditional” to a “modern” society.

Against the backdrop of the rapidly growing urbanization: the changing of the country from agricultural base to almost an industrial one, the horrors of the world wars, human existence for Jibanananda Das is “...on the weird dynamo of the earth”, that is in between life and death. It seems to him that there is no difference between Mahin’s horses busy chewing grass and man’s life. In the moonlit field of late autumn, Mahin’s horses graze with a primordial craving for grass akin to human beings who were continuously “roaming” in order to find some food and shelter after the world was shattered, degenerated and fragmented by the wars and turned into a “waste land” as T.S. Eliot describes Post-war Europe to be. Jibanananda Das seeks a significance to human life which is more than mere biological survival and reproduction like that of other creatures. Conscious of his temporal existence he asks,“Many ages have passed useless; /Will it be the same all through?” It can be shown that Jibanananda’s preoccupation with time is essentially one about human existence.

Time occurs in the poetry of Jibanananda Das in various forms and performs various functions. Time is personified as an omniscient observer. Das observes that Time continues to be awake when everyone’s waking comes to an end. He essentially views Time as god; albeit a non-religious god. Frequent temporal references in his poetry reflect his unabated anxiety about life. This anxiety results from his evaluation of future possibilities vis-a’-vis his current situation which is inexorably linked to human history. This consequence is an intense consciousness of self-existence—a consciousness that is grounded in an authentic perception of reality—reality of men’s futile existence on earth. By way of reflecting on his own reality, Jibanananda connects to the present surrounding him, reflects on the past and contemplates the future.

Reference to historical epochs and places is an indirect representation of time in Das’s poetry. While the concept of time remains impregnable, time necessarily unfolds in space as events take place. Therefore, indirect reference to time as such is only legitimate. However, this also reflects the poet’s consciousness of mankind’s historical presence on earth. Historical referents indicate not only the poet’s affinity with his ancestry but also capture his sense of distance from the first man on earth. Indeed Jibanananda refers to the first man on earth in one of his poems presumably to speculate on how modern man differs. It may be noted that such historicity derives from the poet’s intrinsic motivation to connect himself with his past, not only the immediate past, but the remotest past—as distant as human history ab initio.

The poem “Horse” (Ghora) bears witness to Jibanananda’s attempt to intertwine the modern with the historic-mythic. He sees human existence helplessly situated between a past and a present. While the images such as “stables”, “Mahin’s horses”, “hays”, “grass”, “Tea-cups” and “paraffin-lamp” represent historicity, other images like “dynamo”, “steel mill”, “motel” serve to bring in an impression of industrialisation in the poem. Das shows a transition from the Stone Age then Neolithic Age, and finally to the Modern Age and observes how in the present age human life is “depressed” and deteriorated. He is seen craving for the past where everyone was at peace with “the serene breath of time”—a characteristic that cemented him as one of the greatest modern poets in the vast canon of Bengali Literature.

The “We” in the very opening sentence of the poem seems to be the voice of all mankind uttering “We are not yet dead” but some inhuman and hasty changes brought to both time and space have driven their lives at stake. Giving a surrealistic description, “Tea-cups, like sleepy kittens in a hazy grip of a shabby dog/ Trembled like mist towards the roadside motel”, Das, like Nietzsche’s concept of two opposing forces of nature—the “Apollonian” and the “Dionysian”—starkly juxtaposes the once peaceful past with the sordid present and shows how the past or tradition is at odds with the present or modern. However, Das also gives a note of optimism even in this chaotic environment as we perceive “the smell of the stables [that] floats in a crowded nocturnal breeze”, thus expressing a hope of recovery from the ill-effects of globalization muck like Allen Ginsberg’s poem “Sunflower Sutra” in which the poet comes across a sunflower hitherto alive amongst the trash and ruin that litters the industrial landscape—in a place that does not seem to encourage life—which becomes a direct symbol of the intrinsic value that Ginsberg sees in mankind and man’s ability to endure even though civilization has gone to hell.

To conclude, we can say that Das’s poem “Horse” (Ghora) is subject to various interpretations for avid readers. The titular horse being a symbol of power, courage, freedom, independence, confidence, endurance and triumph will be able to redeem all mankind from their predicament, the poet believes.