Nissim Ezekiel

                                                                               

                                                                               

                                                                          Paper No: 2 Unit No: 3

                                                                          Name: Pooja N. Trivedi

                                                                          Roll No: 36

                                                                          M.A. Part - I SEM - I

                                                                          Year: 2010-11

Submitted To: Mr. Devarshi Mehta

                         Department of English

                          Bhavnagar University,

                          Bhavnagar.

Very few Indian English poets have shown an ability to organize thoughts and life experiences in such a well organized manner as Nissim Ezekiel [1924-2004] has. Ezekiel was influential and his reaction against dominant modes of earlier Indian Poetry in English did involve a change of direction. Ezekiel appeared on the post-independence Diaspora of Indian English Poetry with his own distinct ‘poetics’ and left behind noteworthy poetical works. Bruce Kings in his ‘Modern Indian English Poetry’ in the chapter of ‘History and Publishing circles’ points out that Nissim Ezekiel was at the centre of the group of poets who inaugurated the modernist revolution and injected a new seriousness into the writing of Indian verse following the European Modernist masters such as T.S.Eliot and Ezra Pound. As he comments:

“When Ezekiel returned to India in 1952 from London…he brought with him a poetics that challenged the typical Romanticism of preceding generation.”

          To Ezekiel poetry is not just gift to be gained but a craft to be studied seriously. He follows W.B.Yeats dictum, “Poets like women must labor to be beautiful”

          Ezekiel is perhaps the first Indian poet who has shown Indian readers that not only subject matter but craftsmanship too is a much-asked for aspect of poetry. Ezekiel’s poems can be read and enjoyed independently. They contain new type of theories within which are put forward by Ezekiel to define his own way of writing poetry.

          For him poetry-writing was a way of life - a lofty vocation. He treated life as a journey where poesy would be the main source of discovering and organizing one’s own self. He states in his volume ‘Sixty Poems’ [1953]:

“There is in each a line or phrase an idea or image which helps me to maintain some sort of continuity in my life…poetry is elusive: to write a poem is comparatively easy”

          In one of his poems Ezekiel makes a clear distinction between a poem and poetry:

”A poem is an episode, completed

In an hour or two, but poetry

Is something more. It is the why

The how, the what, the How

From which a poem comes.

…

Is what you read, as a poem, the rest

Flows and is poetry.”

          Poetry does not merely extenuate the pains of living in the poet but much more than that his search for the real idiom as expressed therein. The process of creation is something more. As reflected by Hindi poet Harekrishna Jha and translated by Anita Verma in the poem ’Creation’

“I write up a body

Whose soul is strung up

Inside me

And whose radiance

Like a drop of water

Flashes up

On the body of words

And as soon as

The poem comes on

A soul sheads its body”

          In this he has followed footsteps of Samuel Taylor Coleridge who propounded the better and truer understanding of the poetic process of creation and differentiates poem and poetry. Coleridge states the fundamental discussion of poetic activity. He says:”A poem combines words differently because it is seeking to do something different.”

          Taking such ideas into consideration Ezekiel presents his ideas of ’poetic process’. His comments emphasize impersonality and the need to surrender one’s sense of identity to the dictates of the particular poem being written at the time ‘finding objective correlativeness for both subjective emotions and abstract ideas’. In an essay on ‘How a poem is written’ he relates this to T.S.Eliot’s stress on the need to surrender the self, Eliot describes, “They only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding OBJECTIVE CORELATIVENESS.” In other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion which must terminate in experience, are given the emotion is immediately evoked, e.g., Ezekiel in his poem ‘Night of the Scorpion’ explains about ‘common things’, an ordinary experience.

“I remember the Night

My mother was stung by Scorpion”

          Yet the poem is a new direction, a vision of ordinary reality. In his poetry there is the truth of acknowledging what he felt and experienced in complexity and contradictions.

          Further, his comments also suggest the classical notion of visitation from the Muse, As John Thieme notes:

“Poetry is a form of erotics, a kind of love making that quietly waits for the Muse to make the first move, a medium that is both reticent and suggestive.”

          Besides, Ezekiel remarks how a fellow-Jewish writer Osip Mandelstan composed his poems :

“The wife of the Russsion poet Mandelstam avows that he composed the entire poem in his head before he dictated it to her, and that he revised very little if at all.”

          Both the happiness and the suffering of the poet as poet were derived from the utter dependence on a wholly unpredictable visitation in which words, phrases, lines, stanzas and complete poems arranged themselves, so to speak, and achieved from without that struggle on the page with a writing instrument that is for most writers, the crucial act of writing. In the words of Gujarati writer Govardhanram Tripathi: “The poet has to read his unconscious mind consciously”

          Ezekiel nevertheless asserts that ‘A stage arrives in the composition of a poem, beginning perhaps with clear self-conscious decisions, where decisions are taken out of the poet’s hands’

          Here the theory of Emil Coue [French psychologist] applied aptly. He gave the ‘Law of Reversal Effect’. A person collides with the very thing he did it almost to avoid. The same idea is reflected in his poem ‘The Visitor’:

“Three times I got the message

Sleep walking on the air of thoughts

With muddy clothes, and floated down

Concerned for all created things

To cope with the visitor”

          The poet wants to say that the idea or message knocked at the unconscious of the poet thrice, but when he tries to capture it, it was evaporated “It was not like that at all” and “I see how wrong I was”

          The suggestion is that poets propose but poem dispose, moreover, in 1975 essay on ‘POETRY AS KNOWLEDGE’ he expresses his view that the poet must divorce himself from theoreticians to insist on the integrity, the uniqueness the primacy of the experience of being on fire and not the experience of studying the flame that has cooled down “Just when you give up the process begin”

          In the following lines of the poem ‘Poet, Lover, Birdwatcher’ he describes the task of poet and process of poetry.

“To force the pace and never to be still

Is not the way of those who study birds

Or women. The best poets wait for words

The hunt is not an exercise of will

But patient love relaxing on a hill

To note the movement of a timid wing

Until the one who knows that she is loved

No longer waits but risks surrendering

In this the poet finds his moral proved

Who no longer spoke before his spirit moved”

          This poem is an attempt on the part of Ezekiel to produce his own poetics “Remote and thorny like the heart’s dark floor” is the metaphor used for collection of painful experiences. According to Aristotle tragedy causes Catharsis but it is equally true that poetry itself is the product of Catharsis. And that’s why Ezekiel has said “who never spoke before his spirit moved.”

          Imagination of the poet refers to the ‘spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings’ but it is not the only thing that is required to write a poem. One has to ponder over the experiences stored in the rarely visited regions of the mind “recollected in tranquility” stands for silence, calmness or peace of mind which is required to observe the chain of thoughts.

          Ezekiel’s stance echoes Philip Sidney’s definition of poetic creation that genuine inspiration comes from one’s heart. By all these things, Ezekiel discusses how he has arrived at the form of particular poems. There is rare syntax in his poetry but nonetheless typical of his ability to adopt a particular mode for a particular accession. Through that he transforms ordinary things or experiences into ‘EXTRA’ ordinary. He constructs his poems out of

‘The ordinariness of the most events’

          But he adds his own flavor and color into it. Therefore Ezekiel’s poetry can be characterized as: ‘intellectually complex’. It is essentially cerebral and ironic, rooted in rationality and common sense. Further, by using certain devices of metaphysics, reversal effects, skepticism, paradox etc. he propounds his own creative ideas of poetic creation. Such ideas are blended in his poetry.

          Poets surprise as well as shock. This seems to be the chief concern of the metaphysical poets. Nissim Ezekiel is no exception in this case. He has been much discussed and vein of writing poetry, e.g., “sleep walking on the air of thoughts”, “the mills of God are never slow”. Another characteristic that Ezekiel seems to possess along with the metaphysical poets is the “sudden sharp turn” that takes place in his poems:

“Thank God!

The Scorpion picked on me

And spared my children”

          It is equally important to draw comparison between ‘Vulture’ by Chinua Achebe and ‘Night of the Scorpion’ by Ezekiel. Chinua Achebe also shares the same characteristic. To paraphrase the last few lines of the poem: Thank God for the love in every evil but what about the evil in every lovely heart?”

          This device of sudden of sharp turn is used in special cases. In ‘Background Casually’ the last three stanzas of section II are the best example of it.

“How to feel it home, was the point

Some reading had been done but what

Had I observed except my own

Exasperation? All Hindus are

Like that my father used to say.”

          In a nutshell, poetry is the process of evolution. In the poems of Ezekiel it is found in a way of Ezekiel in particular and man in general. A moment in life, when man wants to pause for a while and look back. All such things are visualized in his poetry. Ezekiel’s poetic persona is virtually a personality in process, a figure aptly characterized by the Yeatsian title of ‘The Unfinished Man’. He remains ‘unfinished’ understands the dimension of experience and for an instant it seems he will have to commit himself one way or the other and the tension generated by the struggle of his persona yield much of his best verse.

          The diversity of the poetic genres that Ezekiel employs is comprehended by the range of his versification. Finally, Ezekiel’s verse is shrewdly the limitations of language and perception, while still confident enough to value the particular kinds of epistemological insight that can be achieved through poetry.