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...