238 I went through this, believing all, Our love denied the Primal Fall. Wordless, we walked among the trees, And felt immortal as the breeze. However many times we came Apart, we came together. The same Thing over and over again. Then suddenly the mark of Cain Began to show on her and me, Why should I ruin the mystery By harping on the suffering rest, Myself a frequent wedding guest? Does Ezekiel consider the "joy of flesh and blood" and the "use of nakedness" sinful?^ The answer is rather ambiguously cloaked in the trenchent emphasis on the absurdity and boredom of "The same / Thing over and over again." The metaphor of "the mark of Cain" is used only lightly to suggest, not any theological implications of the guilt, but its psychological and personal nature. The nature of suffering protrays neither the Freudian Angst nor the Kierkegaardian anxietyo And yet, the persona, in wanting to perseve the mystery, actually wants to demolish itc FOOTNOTES Ie See P, Lal's introduction to Nissim Ezekiel's The Unfinished Man: Poems ^rifteri in 1959 (Calcutta: Writers Workshop, 1960); and Rajeev Taranath and Meena Belliappa, The Poetry of Nissim Ezekiel (Calcutta: Writers Workshop^ 1966)o 2 For somewhat different interpretation of the metaphor of journey, see Michael Garman, "Nissim Ezekiel -- Pilgrimage and Myth," Critical Essays on Indian Writing in English^ edo Naik, Desai and Amur (Dharwar: Karnatak University Press, 1968), ppo 106-21, reproduced in this number of JSAL, p. 209; and Inder Nath Kher, "'That message from another shore': The Esthetic Vision of Nissim Ezekiel," Mahfil, 8 (1972), pp. 17-28. 3, See Northrop Frye's two essays "Historical Criticism: Theory of Modes" and "Archetypal Criticism: Theory of Myths" in his Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (1957; rpto New York: Atheneum, 1967). For the conception of the displacement of myth, see Northrop Frye, "Romantic Myth," in his A Study of English Romanticism (New York: Random House, 1968); and Susanne Ko Langer, Philosophy in a New Key: A Study in the Symbolism of Reason^ Rite,, and Art (1942; rpt. New York: American Library, 1951), po 224 ff»