I have a great fascination for the poetry of Jibanananda Das since I find in him the incarnation of deep poetic art that impresses any modern human being engaged in the act of creativity. His poetry artfully portrays the agonies of modern life, a deep feeling of meaninglessness and vacuity.
Most impressive are his poetic compositions enshrined in surrealism, which creates an aura of dreaminess beset with nebulous thoughts.
In fact, he is the pioneer of surrealistic poetry in the history of Bengali literature, and I daresay no later generation poets have ever surpassed him in this mastery of verbal art.
We may witness the role of dream in the process of his sublime creation.
The scenes in his poems, as if, emerge from a stream of unconscious associations.
In Aat Bochhor Ager Ekdin (One Day Eight Years Ago), the themes of death, memory, and loneliness are expressed through amorphous dictions.
The poem brings a scene of morgue in front of our eyes: “It was heard / he was taken to a morgue last night / in the darkness of spring / when the moon of the fifth day disappeared / he got a desire to die.”
External events are not presented merely as descriptions of incidents; instead, they become means of exploring existential anxiety.
In the poem Mrityur Agey (Before Death) the thought of death is met again: “Do we want to know it before death? Oh, we don’t know the face of grey death like wall, present around the bed of red desire.”
An atmosphere of gloominess recurs in his poems. We witness a sad incident of hunting a deer in the poem Kampey (In the Camp):
“Somewhere a deer is being hunted
The hunters have arrived in the forest
I as if get their smell
Lying on my bed here
I do not fall asleep
In the spring night.”
Jibanananda is most celebrated for his formidable imagery, which transport readers to an unfamiliar territory, wrapped in smog.
He stitches images as if making a panorama with pieces of clouds of different shapes, sizes and colors.
His depiction of nature invokes feelings of beauty, wonder, and mystery in the reader’s mind. In his poem Bodh (A Sense), the poet writes: “Inside my head / Not a dream—not love—some other awareness works!”
Here, the psychological experience falls outside conventional categories of feeling.
The mysterious awareness operates deep within the human mind, directing the individual towards an undefined world.
From a surrealist perspective, this awareness can be interpreted as an expression of the unconscious or the deeper psychological reality of human existence. As such, existential loneliness and the psychological crisis of modern humanity takes center stage.
Jibanananda is often praised as a poet of nature and patriotism. Even there, the familiar natural landscape unveils a mysterious world where we find a mix of reality and surreality.
We are amazed by his imaginative power. Rivers, paddy fields, birds, grass, mist, darkness, and stars touch a higher dimension.
In the poem Nirjan Swakkhor (Signature of Solitude), nature reveals itself with a profound vividness: “I am in green meadow and grass—the sky is lying in skies in blue form; yet can we yield colors of life, touching and stirring—a big wonder!”
We get a spectacular snapshot of morning environment in the poem Obosorer Gan (Song of Leisure):
“The morning sun has taken bed on paddy
Here in the late autumn like a lazy villager
The smell of grass in its bosom—
The fragrance of dew in its eyes
Rice ripens in fatigue getting a taste.”
In Rupasi Bangla (Beautiful Bengal), images of Bengali nature appear repeatedly. Although these elements belong to the familiar landscape of Bengal, Jibanananda’s imagination makes them beautifully surreal: “The bright starry sky in gesture / The grass of far-off land turns blue in the wind / Crickets and grasshoppers have slept / You are in the expansion of mango, neem and hijal trees. -Tumi “(You).”
The poet narrate the story of field with so appealing words:
The moon of meadow is looking
At my face, left and right
Barren land—straws, cracks in land
The water of dew
The moon of meadow curved like a sickle
Looking on
Countless times it has done so!
-“Mather Golpo (The Story of Meadow)”
In many poems of Jibananda, the difference between space and time is blurred, causing an effect of surrealism.
This may be observed in his famous poem Banalata Sen, where the poet describes himself as a traveler, not bound by temporal and spatial constraints.
During his extraordinary journey, he moves from the seas of Ceylon and Malaya to the historical worlds of Bimbisar and Ashok and finally to Vidarbha. Here, personal experience mingles with the vast historical tapestry.
The poet’s psychological journey gets interconnected with real geographical places and historical periods, as a manifestation of magic realism.
The poem opens with the celebrated line: “For thousands of years I have been walking the paths of the earth,” and ends with “Remains there only darkness and Banalata Sen in front of me.”
In another poem Poth Hanta (Walking), he narrates his experience of walking in remote corner of the world: “I have walked in Babylon along in deep night / I don’t know why even after so many busy years.” This is real, unreal and surreal.
Jibanananda Das occupies a unique position in the history of modern Bengali poetry.
Moving beyond the romantic tradition associated with Rabindranath Tagore, he introduced a new poetic style characterized by modernity, loneliness, nostalgia, sadness and love of nature.
In his poetry, the differences between reality and unreality, conscious and unconscious, past and present, and life and death often get neutralized. That is the aesthetic beauty of a great poet.
The more I read the poetry of Jibanananda, the more I am fascinated. And I think I will never get rid of this fascination in my life.
Dr Binoy Barman is a professor of English at Daffodil International University and the executive editor of the Journal of Society and Progress (JSP).