254 "I was brought up in a mildly orthodox Jewish home which gradually became liberal Jewish I attended the liberal Jewish Synagogue in Bombay until I abandoned religion altogether soon after leaving school.11 Nissim Ezekiel is a Maharashtrian Jew, but his early education in an English-medium school led to a total neglect of his mother-tongue, Marathi. Although he began writing verse in his early teens, the period of consolidation was between 1950 and 1952, the years he spent in "voluntary unemployment" in London and in studying philosophy at the University of London,, He admits the influence of Rilke and T. S. Eliot on him, but asserts that he has not formulated any philosophy or aesthetic theoryo There is clearly a very close connection between Ezekiel's life and his poetical work. He is primarily a poet seeking, sometimes in vain, other times successfully, a balance between an almost existential involvement with life and an intellectual quest for commitmento His poetry emerges from a tension between opposites, an emotional plunge into life and a desire for detachment from it; a sensuous perception of the physical world and a spiritual abstraction out of that world; a craving for prayer and a temptation for irony; a passion fo^ this world and a hankering after the world beyond. His poetry is deeply embedded in his life (existence), and at the same time it merges into meditation ^essence)e "Prayer and poetry, poetry and prayer" (A Time to Change). The word "prayer" is used quite often by Ezekiel in a diverse set of poems. In fact, he has recently written a novel set of poems which are entitled "Poster prayerSo" These are described as unconventional and comic "appeals to the universal egoist's silent God," In the poems written in the early phase the world "prayer" is frequently used to denote a feeling of genuine spiritual commitment, though this is very often modified by a kind of subtle scepticism and incisive irony Ezekiel"s post-1967 poems are marked by a strain of what may be described as esthetica11y-1nc1 ined philosophical humanisiTL On the one hand he is conscious of his own mask, but at the same time he aims at "stripping off a hundred veils" of creation and the creator. His theological position has to be stated in purely humanistic terms In this philosophical system aimed at restructuring man's relationship with God, Society and Nature Ezekiel expresses his own inner response: "Lord, I am tired / of being wrong " This feeling of metaphysical exhaustion alternates with a realization that God's truth is too important and g^eat ^or man and, therefore, it cannot be brought within the narrow framework of utilitarian objective: Your trutn 's too momentous for man and not always usefulc Ezekiel becomes conscious of his own mask in the process of realizing his own self as a condition precedent to understanding the nature of divinity: Even as myself, my very own incontrovertible, unexceptional seK, I feel I am d^sguisedo