Picture and book remain,
An acre of green grass
For air and exercise,
Now strength of body goes;
Midnight, an old house
Where nothing stirs but a mouse.
–– W.B.Yeats in An Acre of Grass

‘Is there anybody there?’ said the Traveller,
Knocking on the moonlit door;
And his horse in the silence champed the grasses
Of the forest’s ferny floor:
And a bird flew up out of the turret,
Above the Traveller’s head:
And he smote upon the door again a second time;
‘Is there anybody there?’ he said.
–– Walter de la Mare in The Listeners

Pile the bodies high at Austerlitz and Waterloo.
Shovel them under and let me work—
I am the grass; I cover all.
–– Carl Sandburg in Grass

The eye can hardly pick them out
From the cold shade they shelter in,
Till wind distresses tail and mane;
Then one crops grass, and moves about
- The other seeming to look on -
And stands anonymous again
–– Philip Larkin in At Grass

What is it that makes it flutter across? What is it that keeps swaying over? Green grass is the thing of his reckoning, rumination. It’s O.K. Yeats’ An Acre of Grass not, nor of Walter de la Mare’s turf of the solitary, secluded haunted house of the wooded tract as it lies in The Listeners where the horse of the imaginary rider keep stationed for a while and goes about champing grass under the eerie moonlight and the imaginary listeners listening and he knocking at door, God knows what it the purpose, for what was it the visit of the unknown location away from human haunt and habitation?

Philip Larkin too has written a poem named At Grass, but whose Grass is it more meaningful? Now we have to see it. Perhaps Jayanta’s is the last one as his meaning is not quite clear. We know not what he means to communicate exactly. Thomas Gray in his Elegy talks about the village people lying buried under the heaps beneath the shades of the yew and elm trees, without any stones or memorials in the country churchyard of nondescript hamlets.

Beneath those rugged elms, that yew-tree's shade,
Where heaves the turf in many a mould'ring heap,
Each in his narrow cell for ever laid,
The rude forefathers of the hamlet sleep.
–– Thomas Gray in Elegy

From the starting lines we come to know that he is in stress and he wants to be relieved, but how is the thing to be dispensed with? What is the remedy for and to cure it? But apart from being in pain, he wants to disperse it moving the body, walking it over, clutching it along.

Has the poet to negotiate? 
Moving slowly, sometimes throwing my great grief
across its shoulders, sometimes trailing it at my side,

But while doing that, he sees green grass beneath his feet humming the hymns, a tolerant soil making its way in the sunlight. How beautiful green grass appear, which, is but a source of delight? Grass covers up bare earth. It is green grass which but changes the outlook. Who does not like to walk it over? The wind too passes humming a song. Its whistle too can be marked when it goes away passing through. The poet means to say it outside, not the balcony or the terrace restricting our exits.

I watch a little hymn 
turning the ground beneath my feet, 
a tolerant soil making its own way in the light of the sun.

It is just a mirror to see the images or to see the things getting reflected. The screen catches all the images. Man’s mind and heart too are like green grass if we take it to be so. Mother Earth is same. Only the images keep it changing. Our consciousness is glass-like, sometimes crystal and sometimes opaque. This is as we see the images of life.

And our rot is here, hell is here. But man’s footfall, footprint goes reminding him of his ever coming and ever going, is without an end. Our legs mired into the muck of sensuality, how to wash off? If guilt is in our heart and we feel sinful, what to do it? We can change ourselves, but we cannot the conditions given.

It is just a mirror
marching away solemnly with me, lurching,
into an ancestral smell of rot, reminding me

It is true that we do not like to be glued to one thing and our minds keep changing with shifting and fleeting images. Our secrets we know, what we are, how we are. How are our roots? Our connections? The roots of nativity, can we disconnect them?

of secrets of my own:
the cracked earth of years, the roots staggering about 
an impatient sensuality, bland heads heaving 

The cracked earth is but the ground reality where there lies in holes and ditches. The cracked earth refers to bare realities. Summer too has a turn of its own.

in the loneliness of unknown winds. 
now I watch something out of the mind 
scythe the grass, know that the trees end, 

But while going to the roots, we find it difficult to clear the haze, the awkward clods it clings to.  He wants to scythe grass to know the trees’ end and in doing that he reaches it nowhere. Even though we like to be refreshed by drawing and deriving from green grass, going over the turf or the meadow, our hearts and minds are not so. Our roots are rooted into the mire of lust and greed. Even though we want to uproot, we cannot. Roots too are essential for sprouting.

sensing the almost childlike submissiveness; 
my hands that tear their familiar tormentors apart 
waiting for their curse, the scabs of my dark drab. 

Clearing and cleaning wild vegetation, forested tracks, hilly domains and terrains, flattening them all, what can one do with the cartography of the place, changing the contours? Where will our drab take to unless we lose our way into city lanes, streets and mechanical asphalt buildings full of factories and industries but bereft of greenery and vegetation, gasping for breath and space and fresh air? Is it the barren land we are heading to of intense heat falling and scorching summer parching earth dry and sizzling us vehemently? Is it the waste land that keeps us waiting with disastrous radiation and untimely death and catastrophic doom?

We need green grass, we need green earth to breathe in, to do the exercise, to enjoy nature. The hymn of green grass we hear not but keep about running after reflection. What would have been, had grass been not?

Uprooting grassroots, cutting tree lines, what can we do? Shall we be able to plant new trees? This is our question. Can we wipe our memories? Old trees will remain and it is the process through which things get old. This is the green playground where the poet played as a boy, dreamt the dreams of love in a reclined state. 

Lying on the ground, the poet glosses over the meadows with the singing grass and whistling winds sighing by the breezes flutter it across. Green grass we need, it is our connectivity with earth which is very difficult to be negated.

The first line of the poem is very significant as the poet asks how to negotiate with. He is right in saying, how will he compromise with as grass is the topic?

While reading the poem, we are reminded of Carl Sandburg’s Grass with the lines:

I am the grass.
Let me work.

If we see it otherwise, it is but grass which covers up it all. Frankly speaking, half the legs of ours are but mired into the earth for our graves.

What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow
Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,
And the dry stone no sound of water. 
–– T.S.Eliot in The Waste Land