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English - II

Notes The poet’s father acted differently because he did not believe in prayers, religion and was a man of
reason and logic. He was distraught at the sight of his wife’s agony and even cast aside his beliefs to
somehow reduce her suffering. In his concern for his wife he tried out herbal medicines, magic and
prayers to diminish her pain. The child watched helplessly as his father even poured some paraffin
on the bitten toe and set fire to it. The flame burned brightly making the mother’s pain acute. The
poet remained a mute spectator as he watched the holy priest perform his rituals and used spells to
curb the poison. But all efforts to diminish the mother’s pain proved futile. Her pain subsided after
twenty hours. Forgetting all her torment, the self sacrificing mother uttered words of thanks-giving
to God in making the scorpion choose her as a victim, not her children. Thus the poem which begins
with pain and anxiety ends on a grateful and optimistic tone.

12.1 Life and Works of Nissim Ezekiel

Nissim Ezekiel is one of the foremost Indian Poets writing in english, and he has attracted considerable
critical attention from scholars both in India and abroad. Not only that but also by vigithe of his
critical evaluation, he has brought fame and recognition to a number of Indian English poets.
As a man of letters Nissim Ezekiel is a ‘Protean’ figure. His achievements as a poet and playwright
are considerable. K. Balachandran writes, “The post-Independence Indian poetry saw its new poetry
in the fifties. Among the new poets A.K. Ramanujan, R. Parthasarathy, Shiv K. Kumar, Kamala Das,
Monica Verma, O.P. Bhatnagar, Gauri Deshpande, Adil Jussawalla, Ezekiel occupies a prominent
place. His versatile genius can be found in his poetry, plays, criticism, journalism and
translation.”Nissim Ezekiel has done a good work in Indian writing in English. He has written many
volumes of poems—A Time to Change (1952), Sixty Poems (1953), The Third (1959), The Unfinished
Man (1960), The Exact Name (1965) and others. His plays Nalini, Marriage Poem, The Sleep-Walkers,
Songs of Deprivation and Who Needs No Introduction are already staged and published.
He has also edited books Indian Writers in Conference (1964), Writing in India (1965), An Emerson
Reader (1965), A Martin Luther King Reader (1965) and Arthur Miller’s All My Sons (1972). His
literary essays published in magazines and papers are innumerable. The notable among them are
‘Ideas and Modern Poetry’ (1964), ‘The Knowledge of Dead Secrets’ (1965), ‘Poetry as Knowledge’
(1972), ‘Sri Aurobindo on Poetry’ (1972), ‘Should Poetry be Read to Audience?’ (1972), ‘K.N. Daruwalla’
(1972), ‘Poetry and Philosophy,’ ‘Hindu Society’ (1966). He has written essays on art criticism ‘Modern
Art in India’ (1970), ‘How Good is Sabavala?’ (1973), and ‘Paintings of the Year 1973’ (1973). His
essays on social criticism Thoreau and Gandhi’ (1971), ‘Censorship and the Writer’ (1963), ‘How
Normal is Normality’ (1972), ‘Tradition and All That a Case Against the Hippies’ (1973), ‘A Question
of Sanity’ (1972) and ‘Our Academic Community’ (1968) are varied and auto telic of his wide interest.
Ezekiel is an editor of several journals encouraging writing poetry, plays and criticisrm He also
asked many writers for translation, affecting the theory and practice of the young poets. The writers
like Rilke and W.B. Yeats influenced Ezekiel. Like Yeats, he treated poetry as the ‘record of the mind’s
growth.’ His poetic bulk indicates his growth as a poet-critic and shows his personal importance.Chetan
Karnani states, “At the centre was that sincere devoted mind that wanted to discover itself. In the
process, he managed to forge a unique achievement of his own.”
The poet Ezekiel has already published several volumes of poems. A Time to Change (1952) was his
first book of poems. For him poetry-writing was a lofty vocation, a way of life. He treated life as a
journey where poesy would be the main source of discovering and organising one’s own self. In a
sense, poetry to Ezekiel became a way for self-realisation. He calls life a texture of poetry. He identifies
himself with poetry. So all of his volumes of verse are well-knit and they are in the poet’s view, a
continuation of each other. Ezekiel’s experiments in prose rhythms and his fine sense of structure
and metrical ability. The verse rhythms of T.S. Eliot seem to haunt his mind.Ezekiel’s Sixty Poems
(1953), his second volume of poems was published in 1953. But these poems are loose in structure
and they are less appealing

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