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The making of poetry out of existence is the highest synthesis possible, and what Ezekiel declares himself to be aiming at. Thus his art is also his subject, time and again, in his workc The central metaphor of all the early writings (and a persistent one later on, too) is that of a departure, journey, sea-voyage, or venture,2 Arising from his view of the poet, it affects his approach to his life;
because the poet is a man who travels to an alien land to bring back primal knowledge, Ezekiel looks for a similar pattern of departure and return in his lifeo Each poem bears the mark of the struggle in the "premevat jungle," and in an equilibrium of opposing forces: the African mask's plastic form contrasts with its "catastrophic eyes," the whole equilibrium evoking only
A muffled noise Of dialectic oppositions,
("On an African Mask")
Thus, the first of the following sections of this paper looks at Ezekiel as a poet of pilgrimage -- then, after some suggestions regarding the insufficiency of this approach, the final section looks (very tentatively) at him as myth-maker, in some of the poems of his most recent collection. The Exact Name (1965). For want of space, the final poems are not fully analysed; but I know that further analysis by me would add nothing except further examples to support the view stated. Since this view is tentative, it is not given space at the expense of the treatment of Ezekiel's earlier work; for it is this that must form the basis of any interpretation of the later.
JJ. PILGRIM
The title poem of the first volume, A Time to Change, opens with part of the message of the Spirit to the angel of the church of the Laodiceans, the physical rejection of the indefinite and uncommitted man (Revelation 3J6)o The poem falls into five sections, outlining a man's departure from the home;
consequent desolation and the search for a new life; a look into the desired pattern of the future; a statement of the means of attaining this; and a final recognition of the need for penitential exposure of secret faults. Considered thus abstractly, the poem achieves an association of an initially secular departure from the house with a finally religious striving in the journey; the journey becomes a pilgrimage.
The change to be effected is discussed largely in terms of sex and love:
thus, the drifting protagonist cannot rely on his past for help, for the past is a pattern of servitude to the whore of love on barren winter nights, leaving the traveller in the spring of the year with only an over-rehearsed sexual response, promising no fruit:
The amputated gesture, eyes turned away, Incomplete absorption in the common scene
and
Marking time on unknown ground With faults concealed.