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of a poem includes the meaning of its rhythmic structures as these trace and define emotional and psychological processes. In these poems Ezekiel's sound patterns are astoundingly rigido Very few foot-substitutions -- even of the common trochee and anapest " vary the heavy iambic pulse, and this heaviness is emphasized by the fact that he uses many fewer run-on lines than most poets. For example, "Jamini Roy" has not one foot-substitutiono The poem consists of sixty-four iambic feet one after the other with only six run-on lines out of sixteen, making the sound ponderous and insistento This is heightened by the use of two-line end-stopped sentences, where the syntax reinforces the stilted effect instead of playing dynamically and expressively against the metre and the line breaks o The result is highly literary:
He started with a different style, He travelled, so he found his roots, His rage became a quiet smile Prolific in its proper fruits.
The last line here seems rhyme-forced and unnatural, and the poem as a whole --a great celebration of the redemptive visionary power of art ~ is reduced in power by the clumsy rigidity of its sound; a mechanical application of form which functions as a constricting claustrophobic forceo
Similarly, "Case Study," with its very tight rhyme scheme (a b a a b b) suffers from a startling inflexibility, especially in the use of metreo Let us consider the last stanza:
He came to me and this is what I said:
"The pattern will remain, unless you break It with a sudden jerk, but use your head, Not all returned as heroes who had fled In wanting both to have and eat the cakeo Not a11 who fail are counted with the fake."
We notice immediately the weakness, even triteness, of lines 1 and 5, which seem little more than mechanical fillers of the metrical form. We cannot help hearing, too, the plodding regularity of the iambic feet, again completely unrelieved by substitution, and only salvaged temporarily by the enjambement after line 2o The inflexible sound is exaggerated even more by the number of monosyllabic words -- forty-four out of fifty-two in this stanza -- which pound the meter into the ear with massive force. In a thirty-line pentameter poem there are only three minor foot-substitutions, only two rhymes which are not full and strong. Again 1 have to suggest that the ambitious content of the poem is restricted by the clumsiness of the technique; the psychological subtleties of the "case study" are crudified and coarsened by the unyielding shape into which Ezekiel has forced them
T^ie Unfinished Man suffers throughout from such technical problems o "Urban" is marred by an unnatural rhyme-forced inversion and archaic diction at its c1imax.
But still his mind its traffic turns Away from beach and tree and stone, To kindred clamour close at hand.