224 "no longer waits but risks surrenderingo This poem "Poet, Lover, Bird-Watcher" talks about the unusual patience that lovers and ornithologists possess. Like them, the poets wait until the poem comes to them. The bird-beloved-poem syndrome runs parallel throughout the poem: 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 never spoke before his spirit moved. Ezekiel rightly says that poets do not compose poems but poems are found, as an ornithologist waiting by the hillside suddenly stumbles upon a paradise flycatcher, or as the beloved, who, when she finds she is loved, surrenders to her lovero The poet is like the beloved because unless the body wakes to love or unless the spirit is moved, neither love nor poetry is possible. Only such a painstaking writer could write the following brilliant lines: Whatever the enigma, The passion of the blood, Grant me the metaphor To make it human, goodc^ It is characteristic of Ezekiel to say that mere warmth of human emotions is not enough unless the heavens grant that greatest gift of genius -- the ability to perceive new resemblancesc Such gift enables him to look at the folk art of Jammi Roy with fresh wonder: "The birds are blue aristocrats / Who make my childhood crystallise^'^ The word "crystallise" shows the poet's rare ability to bnng a word evocatively alive in a new contexto In writing on the folk art of Jamini Roy, Ezekiel did what he wanted to do himself. One can communicate to the largest number of people only when one paints in a popular idiorrio Just as a poet should learn the habit of seeing things with naked eyes, so an artist should see objects in their primitive simplicity: A people painted what it saw With eyes of supple innocence. An urban artist found the law To make its spirit sing and dance. Jamini Roy did not believe in surrealistic nonsense^ Nor did he depict the dreams and neurosis of elderly people. He saw objects with the innocence of a child. In Freudian terms, this was regression that sought its sublimation in art. Thus Jamini Roy's subjects were not sex and power -- the main motives behind human action -- but the innocent world of a child: