Background Casually by Nissim Ezekiel, critical analysis and summary

Background Casually

NissimEzekiel (1924-2004)

—  Indian Jewish poet, actor, playwright, editor and art critic, foundational figure in postcolonial India’s literary history

—  Awarded Sahitya Akademi Award for 1983 poetry collection “Latter Day Psalms”

—  He is applauded for his subtle restrained well crafted diction, dealing with common and mundane themes in a manner that manifests both cognitive profundity and as an unsentimental, realistic sensibility that has been influential on the course of succeeding Indian English Poetry.

—  He enriched and established Indian English poetry through his modernist innovations and techniques which enlarged Indian English literature, moving it beyond purely spiritual and orientalist themes to include a wider range of concerns and interest including mundane familial events individual angst and skeptical societal inspection.

—  He is described as “the father of post-independence Indian verse”

—  His famous poems are “ Night of the Scorpion” and Anti- jingoism poem “The Patriot”

Works

—  Time to change (1952)

—  The unfinished man (1960)

—  The exact name (1965)

—  Snakeskin and other poem translation of Marathi poet Indira Sant

—  Hymns in Darkness (1976)

—  Latter day Psalms (1982)

PLAYS

—  The three plays 1969

—  Do not call it suicide (1993)

PROSE

—  Naipaul’s India and mine

POEM

A poet-rascal-clown was born,
The frightened child who would not eat
Or sleep, a boy of meager bone.
He never learned to fly a kite,
His borrowed top refused to spin.
I went to Roman Catholic school,
A mugging Jew among the wolves.
They told me I had killed the Christ,
That year I won the scripture prize.
A Muslim sportsman boxed my ears.
I grew in terror of the strong
But undernourished Hindu lads,
Their prepositions always wrong,
Repelled me by passivity.
One noisy day I used a knife.
At home on Friday nights the prayers
Were said. My morals had declined.
I heard of Yoga and of Zen.
Could 1, perhaps, be rabbi saint?
The more I searched, the less I found.

Twenty two: time to go abroad.
First, the decision, then a friend
To pay the fare. Philosophy,
Poverty and Poetry, three
Companions shared my basement room.
The London seasons passed me by.
I lay in bed two years alone,
And then a Woman came to tell
My willing ears I was the Son
Of Man. I knew that I had failed
In everything, a bitter thought.
So, in an English cargo ship
Taking French guns and mortar shells
To Indo China, scrubbed the decks,
And learned to laugh again at home.
How to feel it home, was the point.
Some reading had been done, but what
Had I observed, except my own
Exasperation? All Hindus are
Like that, my father used to say,
When someone talked too loudly, or
Knocked at the door like the Devil.
They hawked and spat. They sprawled around.

I prepared for the worst. Married,
Changed jobs, and saw myself a fool.
The song of my experience sung,
I knew that all was yet to sing.
My ancestors, among the castes,
Were aliens crushing seed for bread
(The hooded bullock made his rounds).
One among them fought and taught,
A Major bearing British arms.
He told my father sad stories
Of the Boer War. I dreamed that
Fierce men had bound my feet and hands.
The later dreams were all of words.
I did not know that words betray
But let the poems come, and lost
That grip on things the worldly prize.
I would not suffer that again.
I look about me now, and try
To formulate a plainer view:
The wise survive and serve–to play
The fool, to cash in on
The inner and the outer storms.
The Indian landscape sears my eyes.
I have become a part of it
To be observed by foreigners.
They say that I am singular,
Their letters overstate the case.
I have made my commitments now.
This is one: to stay where I am,
As others choose to give themselves
In some remote and backward place.
My backward place is where I am.

Analysis

—  “Background, Casually” tells about the struggle of the poet for identity in a country where he and his community are considered alien

—  3 sections

1.    Deals with childhood of the poet

2.    Throws light on his adult age

3.    Old age

Section 1

—  Ezekiel uses third person for himself. According to him he was born low. Being a member of alien community, he could never eat nor sleep and thus become weak. Due to this feeling he could not fly kite. Even the top also failed to spin in his hands

—  He was sent to Roman Catholic school, where he was like a prey before the wolves (Hindus and Muslims)

—  He was often taunted by Hindus and Muslims who accused him of the murder of Christ. They compared him to Judas who betrayed Christ

—  The same year he won Scripture Prize depicting he was quite good in his schooling

—  He was often beaten by a muslim boy and terror reigned in his mind during that stage

—  Hindu boys repelled him away with their wrong accent and use of language. Being enraged he even thought becoming violent and used his knife though he did not mention where how and why he used his knife

—  One night he heard prayers that made him believe that he is no morally so good

—  He thought if he could still become a Rabbi. But deeper he thought, the more confused he became

Section 2

—  Ezekiel talks about his adult age experiences. His family desired to send him to England for higher studies but being financially poor they could not afford his expenses. However one of his friends paid for him and he was able to go to England.

—  There he was alone and considered poverty, poetry and philosophy of his friends. Even after two years he was alone. A woman came and tried to motivate him and he tried to make his life better.

—  He recognized his failure which became unbearable thought. After spending some years there he desired to go back to India

—  After  coming to India, Ezekiel tried to be happy and feel at home again.

—  His father told him that Hindus are violent. He married changed his job, started writing poetry and knew that he had ample to write

Section 3

—  His experience as an old person

—  He recognized that writing poetry is also not safe and even the words can harm a person

—  He wrote poems and gave up his suffering , now he tried to write wisely without paying free play to his thoughts

—  He expresses his inner and outer suffering that he ultimately failed to defeat. He says he has become an integral part of India.

—  The foreigners consider him to be an alien but he decided now he will consider himself an Indian

—  The poem’s significance to Ezekiel’s oeuvre lies partly in it being an autobiographical poem, which is seen to indicate crisply his “official view of life”

—  Ezekiel’s general tendency in this poem is to be more communicative than be imagistic is evident

—  Similarly the ironic tone that swings between whipping the self and the society around it is also on abundant display in the poem.

Themes

—  Culture, identity, race, history and sense of belonging

—  It is up to the individual and not the society to decide where he most belongs and feels more comfortable with

—  Loss of identity in Indian society

—  Alienation

Recurrent motifs

—  Finding satisfaction in limited ambition

—  A set of experiences stated as providing deep insights

—  Use of unrhymed metrical lines

—  Probing the question of identity in a firm social content

—  Controlled fragmentation unlike the modernist tendency of obscurity.

 

Philip Larkin’s “Church Going” Summary and Analysis

 

PhilipLarkin’s “Church Going”

Philip Larkin (1922-1985)

—  English poet, novelist and librarian

—  He edited The Oxford Book of Twentieth Century

—  He declined the position of Poet Laureate

—  S K Chatterjee “Larkin is no longer just a name but an institution, a modern British national monument ”

—  Larkin’s style was traditional, the subject matter was derived from modern life

—  In 1946, Larkin discovered poetry of Thomas Hardy

—  Larkin focused on intense personal emotion but strictly avoided sentimentality or self-pity.

—  Larkin’s words possess what Martin Amis has termed “frictionless memorability”

Works

—  Poetry

—  The North ship 1945

—  The Less Deceived 1955

—  The Whitsun Wedding 1964

—  High Windows 1974

—  Novels

—  Jill 1946

—  A Girl in Winter 1947

—  Criticism, essays and reviews on Jazz Music

—  All What Jazz: A record Diary 1961-1968

—  Required Writing : Miscellaneous pieces 1955

Poem

·      Once I am sure there’s nothing going on
I step inside, letting the door thud shut.
Another church: matting, seats, and stone,
And little books; sprawlings of flowers, cut
For Sunday, brownish now; some brass and stuff
Up at the holy end; the small neat organ;
And a tense, musty, unignorable silence,
Brewed God knows how long. Hatless, I take off
My cycle-clips in awkward reverence,

—  Move forward, run my hand around the font.
From where I stand, the roof looks almost new-
Cleaned or restored? Someone would know: I don’t.
Mounting the lectern, I peruse a few
Hectoring large-scale verses, and pronounce
“Here endeth” much more loudly than I’d meant.
The echoes snigger briefly. Back at the door
I sign the book, donate an Irish sixpence,
Reflect the place was not worth stopping for.

—  Yet stop I did: in fact I often do,
And always end much at a loss like this,
Wondering what to look for; wondering, too,
When churches fall completely out of use
What we shall turn them into, if we shall keep
A few cathedrals chronically on show,
Their parchment, plate, and pyx[1] in locked cases,
And let the rest rent-free to rain and sheep.
Shall we avoid them as unlucky places?

—  Or, after dark, will dubious women come
To make their children touch a particular stone;
Pick simples[2] for a cancer; or on some
Advised night see walking a dead one?
Power of some sort or other will go on
In games, in riddles, seemingly at random;
But superstition, like belief, must die,
And what remains when disbelief has gone?
Grass, weedy pavement, brambles, buttress[3], sky,

—  A shape less recognizable each week,
A purpose more obscure. I wonder who
Will be the last, the very last, to seek
This place for what it was; one of the crew
That tap and jot and know what rood-lofts[4] were?
Some ruin-bibber[5], randy for antique,
Or Christmas-addict, counting on a whiff
Of gown-and-bands[6] and organ-pipes and myrrh?
Or will he be my representative,

—  Bored, uninformed, knowing the ghostly silt
Dispersed, yet tending to this cross of ground
Through suburb scrub because it held unspilt
So long and equably what since is found
Only in separation — marriage, and birth,
And death, and thoughts of these — for whom was built
This special shell? For, though I’ve no idea
What this accoutred[7] frowsty barn is worth,
It pleases me to stand in silence here;

—  A serious house on serious earth it is,
In whose blent air all our compulsions meet,
Are recognised, and robed as destinies.
And that much never can be obsolete,
Since someone will forever be surprising
A hunger in himself to be more serious,
And gravitating with it to this ground,
Which, he once heard, was proper to grow wise in,
If only that so many dead lie round.

 

Churchgoing

—  One of the best loved poems

—  Appeared in The Less Deceived (1955)

—  In an interview (1981), Larkin said “it came from the  first time  I saw a ruined church in N. Ireland ”

—  By the mid 1950s, the Church of England was in the process of long and gradual decline both in numbers and authority. 

Historical Background

—  Larkin had kept a newspaper clipping from the Church Times on May 7, 1954 entitled “Save our church week” announcing a campaign for the Historic Churches preservation Trust. In the clipping the Archbishop of Canterbury said that over 2000 churches must be helped at once from falling into ruin

—  Church going is a medium length poem that explores the issues of the church as a spiritual base. It begins ordinarily enough as do many of Larkin’s poems, then progresses into the subject matter.

Theme

—  Religion

—  The established Church

—  The need to worship

—  The Ceremony of ritual

—  The future of church

—  Superstition

—  Religious feeling

Structure

—  7 stanzas each with 9 iambic pentametre lines

—  Use of end rhymes and enjambment

—  Rhyme scheme : ababcaece

Poem in a glance

—  The Speaker glances around and notices all the items that are consistent throughout all the churches  that h has visited

—  There are books, set of stones, unignorable overwhelming silence

—  The speaker continues his journey through the church and takes to  reading from the bible.

—  He speaks a few verses in an increased volume, spreading the words around the space.

—  This ends his tour around the church and he departs leaving an “Irish sixpence” an incredibly small amount in the donation box

—  He is curious about what the churches will be or what the human race will utilize all the churches for, when the very last believer is gone.

—  When they have fallen completely out of use, will they be avoided as unlucky places

—  Or will the sheep have full rein over their interiors

—  He considers the possibility that in the future people will still come to churches for a variety of spiritual reason

—  Mothers might bring their children to touch a particular stone for luck or perhaps people will come to see the dead walking

—  He says power of some sort might go on even if the traditional meaning is gone

—  Rood loft and rood screen : it is a feature of late medieval church architecture that was situated between chancel and the nave at the front of the church

—  The most important times of human lives are connected to religion, Birth and Death

—  The title of the poem gives two meaning

—  1. regular visit to the church

—  2. decline of the institution

—  A few cathedrals may be preserved as museums for future generation because of its great art and architecture value

—  The church is a “serious house on the serious earth”

—  A church is a symbol of man’s existence and his search for ultimate meaning of life.