Unit-III

Toru Dutt, ‘Our Casuarina Tree’

LIKE a huge Python, winding round and round

The rugged trunk, indented deep with scars,
Up to its very summit near the stars,
A creeper climbs, in whose embraces bound
No other tree could live. But gallantly
The giant wears the scarf, and flowers are hung
In crimson clusters all the boughs among,
Whereon all day are gathered bird and bee;
And oft at nights the garden overflows
With one sweet song that seems to have no close,
Sung darkling from our tree, while men repose.

When first my casement is wide open thrown

At dawn, my eyes delighted on it rest;
Sometimes, and most in winter,—on its crest
A gray baboon sits statue-like alone
Watching the sunrise; while on lower boughs
His puny offspring leap about and play;
And far and near kokilas hail the day;
And to their pastures wend our sleepy cows;
And in the shadow, on the broad tank cast
By that hoar tree, so beautiful and vast,
The water-lilies spring, like snow enmassed.

But not because of its magnificence

Dear is the Casuarina to my soul:
Beneath it we have played; though years may roll,
O sweet companions, loved with love intense,
For your sakes, shall the tree be ever dear.
Blent with your images, it shall arise
In memory, till the hot tears blind mine eyes!
What is that dirge-like murmur that I hear
Like the sea breaking on a shingle-beach?
It is the tree’s lament, an eerie speech,
That haply to the unknown land may reach.

Unknown, yet well-known to the eye of faith!

Ah, I have heard that wail far, far away
In distant lands, by many a sheltered bay,
When slumbered in his cave the water-wraith
And the waves gently kissed the classic shore
Of France or Italy, beneath the moon,
When earth lay trancèd in a dreamless swoon:
And every time the music rose,—before
Mine inner vision rose a form sublime,
Thy form, O Tree, as in my happy prime
I saw thee, in my own loved native clime.

Therefore I fain would consecrate a lay

Unto thy honor, Tree, beloved of those
Who now in blessed sleep for aye repose,—
Dearer than life to me, alas, were they!
Mayst thou be numbered when my days are done
With deathless trees—like those in Borrowdale,
Under whose awful branches lingered pale
“Fear, trembling Hope, and Death, the skeleton,
And Time the shadow;” and though weak the verse
That would thy beauty fain, oh, fain rehearse,
May Love defend thee from Oblivion’s curse.

Summary:

The poem "Our Casuarina Tree" is from Dutt's Ancient Ballads and Legends of Hindustan (1882).
It is one of Dutt's most famous poems, and it describes a tree near the speaker's home that she
associates heavily with memories of her childhood and her siblings that have since died, "Who
now in blessed sleep, for aye, repose." The word "our" in the title hints at this significance—it is
not just an ordinary tree for the poet, but rather a part of her life and an integral part of her
childhood that she shared with her siblings.
The poem's opening lines describe the grandeur of the Casuarina in minute detail, standing erect
and wearing the "scarf" of the "creeper" that clutches it like "a huge python." The tree is a
source of life, filled with "bird[s] and bee[s]," though the children who used to play under its
branches are long gone. This liveliness that surrounds the tree is further detailed in the second
stanza, which tells of a "baboon," "kokilas," and "cows" in its vicinity.

Still, in the third stanza, the speaker tells us explicitly that it is "not because of its magnificence /
[that] Dear is the Casuarina to my soul"—rather, it is because of her memories of her departed
siblings. At the thought of their deaths and their past memories, even the tree seems to
"lament" and ushers forth "an eerie speech." In the fourth stanza, the speaker recalls various
foreign shores (namely, "France or Italy") where she heard noise similar to the tree's mournful
sighs, and recalled the tree and her "own loved native clime."

As the poem closes, the speaker meditates on the "deathless trees" in "Borrowdale" that carry
the same grim weight as those in William Wordsworth's poem on yew-trees, which she quotes:
"Fear, trembling Hope, and Death, the skeleton, / And Time the shadow." By contrast, the
speaker tells us, she yearns to return to the Casuarina tree of her youth, which she hopes will be
saved "from Oblivion's curse."

Analysis:

In terms of its form, the poem consists of fifty-five lines, written in five stanzas of eleven lines
each. Each stanza consists of an octave of two enclosed-rhyme quatrains, followed by a rhyming
tercet (three lines which rhyme). Its overall rhyme scheme is thus ABBACDDCEEE FGGFHIIHJJJ
KLLKMNNMOOO PQQPRSSRTTT UVVUWXXWYYY. The enclosed-rhyme octave of each stanza
allows Dutt to develop a new line of thought in each stanza, while the rhyming tercet at the end
of each stanza reinforces not only the constancy and finality of death, but also—because they
evoke previous stanzas in their repetition—the echoes of the past that resurface through
memory. Further, the fact that each stanza ends with a rhyming tercet rather than a rhyming
couplet (two lines) gives the impression of overflow or transcendence, which mirrors the feelings
that the speaker imparts to the Casuarina tree at the center of the poem.

The linkage of the speaker's personal life and emotional state to the natural world is not limited,
however, to the Casuarina tree. For example, the birds and bees singing their "one sweet song"
from the tree's branches provide solace to the poet through the night "while men repose,"
which suggests that the poet lies sleepless at night and can be soothed only by the rhythms of
the natural world. The "grey baboon" in stanza 2, which sits "statue-like [and] alone" on top of
the tree while "watching the sunrise," also reinforces this idea, suggesting that the poet too has
watched in solitude as the sun rises the behind the Casuarina tree.

In the third stanza, the speaker makes this linkage explicit as she explains that the tree's memory
is "blent with [...] images" in her head of her departed siblings. The shared mourning of the
speaker and the tree, as conveyed by the "dirge-like murmur" that resembles the waves
breaking on a pebble beach, continues to reinforce this connection. In the fourth stanza, this
image of the waves breaking carries us to foreign shores, where "waves gently [kiss] the classic
shore" but evoke similar mourning in our speaker's mind. This is why, while the rest of the world
"l[ies] trancèd in a dreamless swoon," the speaker stays awake as the music of her youth, the
music of the tree, swims to her in her "inner vision."

In the final stanza, the speaker's care to distinguish the trees of England from the Casuarina tree
of her youth further shows the way in which the speaker associates nature at large with her
various emotions. While the Casuarina tree stands in for nostalgia, longing, and memory, the
trees of England reflect isolation and "verse" that is not true to her own experiences.

This final moment in the poem is also particularly interesting because it implicates the poet
herself and the poem itself. The poet is hesitant about her gift of writing poetry, and she feels
that her own words are "weak," but she appeals to "Love" in her plea for the tree to be
protected from time's ravages. This links the poem not only to Dutt's preoccupation with loss,
the natural world, and the complexity of family relationships, but also to her interest in the
nature of the poetic craft and how much of life's complexities can be accurately captured in a
poetic format. This moment also lends itself to a larger interpretive discussion about how Dutt
envisions the potency of one of her major poetic projects—that is, her choice to use English
verse forms like those used by Wordsworth (who she simultaneously seems to respect and
dismiss in the poem) to describe Indian scenes like those of the tree and her youth.

Toru Dutt as a poet:

In many ways, Toru Dutt's poetry sheds light on her status as a transitional or hybrid figure,
situated not just at the crossroads of different cultures and traditions but also at a turning point
in literary history. Within a single landscape or story, Dutt sees not just a stage for literary
description or explanation, but rather a ground on which the very nature of human existence
can be contested, opened up to discussion, and made nuanced.
In what are perhaps her most famous poems—those which, like "Sita," "Buttoo," and
"Lakshman," retell traditional legends or stories from her native India—this tendency is put on
full display. Not only does Dutt—as is suggested by the title of the collection in which these
works appear, Ancient Ballads and Legends of Hindustan (1882)—rework these Indian stories to
mostly fit within the constraints of an English verse form (i.e., the ballad), but she also is able to
take these canonical stories and inject them with new, personal flourishes. "Buttoo," for
example, is not just a poem which retells the Ekalavya story from the Sanskrit epic Mahabharata,
but it complicates the Ekalavya story by adding in an element of class tension, the theme of
rejection, and an explicit moral at the tale's close. Such additions not only lend the tales Dutt
reworks an increased sense of reality or verisimilitude, but also serve to make them more
understandable for the English-speaking audiences of her poems (though she was Bengali, Dutt
is famous for her poetry written in French and English).
Still, Dutt is not content to simply make her own Eastern cultural heritage intelligible to a
Western audience. Also present in Ancient Ballads are poems like "Our Casuarina Tree," "The
Tree of Life," and "Baugmaree," which seek to wrestle with Dutt's life experiences as
contextualized by her encounters with different cultures and religions in Colonial India (i.e.,
Indian and European, Christian and Hindu, etc.), exploring the porous and interpenetrating
experiences she has of these different influences. In "Our Casuarina Tree," for example, Dutt
seeks to find her own place as a poet in the shadow of Wordsworth but simultaneously looks
down on English landscapes as unable to match the lasting influence of one of her favorite
childhood trees. In "The Tree of Life," Dutt takes us, from an interior Indian scene with her
father, deep into the space of Christian imagery where she finds an angel and the Tree of Life.
Similar work is done in "Baugmaree," where Dutt links the garden home of her youth to the
Biblical space of Eden.
Even though Dutt's "Christian training" and her "girlhood spent partly in France and partly in
England" are influential in what English historian H.A.L. Fisher calls Dutt's unique "appreciation
of [...] Western literature" and "hold upon the essential soul of the two languages in which she
wrought"—it is not just this linking of East and West that is impressive and significant in Dutt's
larger body of work. Indeed, even in the translations that Dutt undertakes in her first
collection, A Sheaf Gleaned in French Fields (1876), what stands out is not just Dutt's multilingual
and multicultural comprehension, but also her preoccupation and foregrounding of the themes
of loss, youth, and the nature. Like many other authors whose work is translated in A Sheaf, Dutt
has a deep, Romantic interest in the relationship or rift (depending on the context) between
mankind and the natural world. Unlike some of these authors, however, Dutt's exploration of
nature is not based in a singular understanding of nature as sublime and pure, nor an
understanding of the natural world as deterministic; rather, Dutt allows nature to take on a
variety of dynamic roles in her work that intermingle personal experiences of loss and growth,
self-discovery, and deep reflection. These various roles played by nature in Dutt's work also
relate closely to her own personal life, where her foundational experiences with her late siblings
and with poetry in general are linked to the various natural environments in which she was
raised.
However, even this nuanced understanding of Dutt is not sufficient to capture her unique genius
and complexity. Though much scholarship and attention is devoted to her positioning as a poet
of East and West, her attention to nuanced feelings regarding loss, and her role as a
representative of a unique Romantic sensibility, Dutt must also be understood as an important
woman writer. Among the many projects Dutt juggled before her death, one was a translation of
French author Clarisse Bader's work on women in India. Moreover, in poems like "Sita," Dutt
explores the shared experiences of women throughout time in linking herself to both her
mother and Sita, who are also set up as parallels. This understanding of Dutt—not only a key
figure of Indian and global Romanticism but also an important woman writer of Colonial India—
positions her uniquely in both literary and conventional history and has contributed greatly to
her posthumous popularity among both Indian and global readers.
Kamala Das, ‘My Grandmother’s House’

There is a house now far away where once

I received love……. That woman died,
The house withdrew into silence, snakes moved
Among books, I was then too young
To read, and my blood turned cold like the moon
How often I think of going
There, to peer through blind eyes of windows or
Just listen to the frozen air,
Or in wild despair, pick an armful of
Darkness to bring it here to lie
Behind my bedroom door like a brooding
Dog…you cannot believe, darling,
Can you, that I lived in such a house and
Was proud, and loved…. I who have lost
My way and beg now at strangers' doors to
Receive love, at least in small change?

"My Grandmother's House," an autobiographical poem by Indian writer Kamala Das, tells a story
of nostalgia and sorrow. The poem's speaker longs to return to her grandmother's house, where
she once felt loved and secure—especially now that she lives a lonely adult life, mourning the
safety and comfort of her childhood. This poem was published in Das's 1965 collection Summer
in Calcutta.

Summary:

The speaker begins by remembering a long-lost house in which she felt loved. The speaker's

grandmother (who lived there) died, and after her death, the house fell silent. Snakes slithered

between the books. At this time, the speaker was still a child and couldn't read yet. When her

grandmother died, the speaker felt as if her blood had turned as cold as the moon. The speaker

often dreams of going back to the house and squinting through its empty windows or listening to

the cold, lifeless air. She imagines that, in a moment of deep anguish, she might scoop up some

of the house's gloom in her arms and take it home to keep in her bedroom, where it would lie

around like a moping dog. Addressing a loved one she calls her "darling," the speaker says they

couldn't possibly believe she once lived in a house where she was happy, proud, and cared

for. She says she has wandered off course now; she spends her time trying to gather crumbs of

love from strangers.

Introduction:

The poem My Grandmother’s House is written by Kamala Das. The poem has been written in the
memory of her grandmother with whom she had spent her childhood.

The poet considers those moments to be the best moments of her life and desires to get them. She
also mourns their loss. Like her poem An Introduction, this poem also falls into the category
of confessional poetry.

Reminiscence:

At the beginning of the poem, the poet says that there is a home that is now very far from her where
she received love. It was the house of her grandmother in which she spent the days of her
childhood.

However, that woman, (her grandmother) is dead now and the home “withdrew in silence” i.e. is
without any life because her grandmother was the very soul of it.

Grandmother also had books which she could not read as he was quite young and she would read
stories for her (poet). But now the snakes are moving in those books. All these things made the
house quite horrible and the poet “like the moon” i.e. quite unhappy. She is now without any life
and warmth.

Desire:

The poet expresses her desire to go to her grandmother’s house because she is emotionally attached
to it since her childhood. She wants to look through the “blind eyes of windows” of her
grandmother’s house.

The term “blind eyes of windows” means that there is no one (in other words, her grandmother) in
the house to look for. She also desires to listen to “the frozen air” of that house. “Frozen
Air” probably means that that the house is locked and the fresh air has not moved in.

In my views, the poet desires to move into her thoughts which are buried deep inside her heart and
no air has blown into it. Thus the grandmother’s house here is rather a sweet memory that she
wants to recall.

The poet further says that she wants to bring the darkness of her grandmother’s house with her “in
wild despair” i.e. in her troubled life.

The line makes it clear that her grandmother was very protective. And now that she feels insecure,
even the darkness of her grandmother’s house, which is though unpleasant like cold moon comforts
her.
Begging for Love:

In the final lines, the poet is in conversation probably with her husband or her readers. The poet says
that one won’t believe that she had some of the best memories of her grandmother’s house and she
is quite proud of it.

Now that she has lost her grandmother, she begs at strangers’ doors for love. She knows well that
you won’t be able to get that much love but she still hopes for at least a part of it.

Hence the poet ends with hope and despair. In her poem, My Mother at Sixty-Six the poet is
struggling with similar feelings. Please refer to this doc for further reading. Here are some important
questions and answers to this poem.
Nissim Ezekiel, ‘The Night of the Scorpion’

I remember the night my mother

was stung by a scorpion. Ten hours
of steady rain had driven him
to crawl beneath a sack of rice.

Parting with his poison - flash

of diabolic tail in the dark room -
he risked the rain again.

The peasants came like swarms of flies

and buzzed the name of God a hundred times
to paralyse the Evil One.

With candles and with lanterns

throwing giant scorpion shadows
on the mud-baked walls
they searched for him: he was not found.
They clicked their tongues.
With every movement that the scorpion made his poison moved in Mother's blood, they said.

May he sit still, they said

May the sins of your previous birth
be burned away tonight, they said.
May your suffering decrease
the misfortunes of your next birth, they said.
May the sum of all evil
balanced in this unreal world

against the sum of good

become diminished by your pain.
May the poison purify your flesh

of desire, and your spirit of ambition,

they said, and they sat around
on the floor with my mother in the centre,
the peace of understanding on each face.
More candles, more lanterns, more neighbours,
more insects, and the endless rain.
My mother twisted through and through,
groaning on a mat.
My father, sceptic, rationalist,
trying every curse and blessing,
powder, mixture, herb and hybrid.
He even poured a little paraffin
upon the bitten toe and put a match to it.
I watched the flame feeding on my mother.
I watched the holy man perform his rites to tame the poison with an incantation.
After twenty hours
it lost its sting.

My mother only said

Thank God the scorpion picked on me
And spared my children.

Summary:

In "Night of the Scorpion," the speaker tells a story from his childhood in which his mother was
bitten by a scorpion. The poem begins with a simple declaration: "I remember the night my mother /
was stung by a scorpion" (1-2). The scorpion had entered the speaker's home because it wanted to
hide from the rain. When it bit the speaker's mother, it was hiding beneath a sack of rice.

The speaker describes the incident in which the scorpion stings his mother without mentioning his
mother at all. Instead, he focuses on the scorpion and what he did immediately afterward: "Parting
with his poison—flash / of diabolic tail in the dark room— / he risked the rain again" (5-7). Rather
than stick around and look at the scene he had caused, the scorpion ran back outdoors.

After the speaker's mother was bitten, the speaker notes that poor people went to his mother's side
"like swarms of flies," buzzing with Christianity and hoping to kill one of their visions of Satan (8). The
peasants look for the scorpion on their hands and knees with lanterns. Their wish is to find the
scorpion quickly because they believe that every movement the scorpion makes without getting
killed affects the speaker's mother: "With every movement that the scorpion made his poison
moved in Mother's / blood, they said" (16-18).

The peasants begin to share good wishes for the speaker's mother, hoping that the scorpion will die
that night, or at least sit still, that the sins of her past life will be burned away, and that she may
return to an even better life in her next life because of her suffering.

The peasants continue making wishes for the speaker's mother, wishing that the forces of evil might
be diminished by the speaker's mother's pain. They sat on the floor around the speaker's mother,
hoping that the scorpion's bite would "purify" her, with "the peace of understanding on each face"
(29).

As more people come to visit the speaker's mother, the speaker takes in his surroundings: "More
candles, more lanterns, more neighbours, / more insects, and the endless rain" (30-31). The
speaker's mother, oblivious to it all, spent this time suffering and twisting on a mat.

The speaker turns his attention to his father, who he describes as a "sceptic" and "rationalist" (34).
The speaker notes that even his father is making an effort to help his mother in any way that he
knows how, which means turning towards that which he wouldn't otherwise believe: "trying every
curse and blessing, / powder, mixture, herb and hybrid" (35-36). The speaker's father even lit the
bite on fire in an attempt to remove the poison.
The speaker's mother suffered for 20 hours. Her only response at the end of it all was her gratitude
that it didn't happen to anyone else in their family: "My mother only said / Thank God the scorpion
picked on me / And spared my children" (43-5).

Analysis:

"Night of the Scorpion," which was published as a part of The Exact Name, demonstrates a new and
emerging aesthetic in Ezekiel's poetry. Whereas his early poems conformed to a strict meter and
rhyme, later poems like "Night of the Scorpion" adopts a natural, colloquial meter and tone. This
poem was published in a time when Ezekiel was making a deliberate attempt at formal innovation by
using a loose, seemingly free-verse structure for his narrative poems. Additionally, Ezekiel stopped
putting capitals at the beginning of each line, which allows his later poems to flow much more easily
on the page.
The fact that Ezekiel distances himself from formal poetic conventions does not imply a lack of care
when it comes to the form of "Night of the Scorpion." In fact, Ezekiel makes deliberate choices about
line breaks, enjambment, voice, chronology, and tone in this poem which gives it the effect on the
reader that made it so famous to begin with. There is only one line break in this poem, which occurs
right after the speaker's mother is released from her suffering:

"After twenty hours

it lost its sting.

My mother only said

thank God the scorpion picked on me

and spared my children" (44-48).

This line break is a literal break in the tension of the poem and endows the conclusion with a quiet
depth. The tension in the poem before the line break comes from two sources: first, that the
speaker's mother is suffering with little prospect of relief, and second, the tension that the speaker
holds between personal crisis and mocking social observation.

While the personal crisis is clearly on the surface of the poem, the mocking social commentary is
evident through the speaker's tone. The speaker in the poem, who inhabits a perspective between
the little boy watching his mother suffer and the older man looking back upon that memory, relays
the events of the crisis in a calm and detached manner. The casualness with which the speaker
relays this scene is incongruous and even alarming for the reader. Even so, the speaker moves slowly
through the events of the poem in one long stanza without breaks—unhurried and, it seems,
unbothered. This emotional detachment lets the poem speak directly to the reader, who
understands right away what Ezekiel means without having to juggle emotional pain over the
suffering mother.

When the speaker addresses the peasants, we find a tone that we often see in the Collected
Works—Ezekiel's sardonic and mocking gaze, which is the gaze of an insider that is nonetheless
distanced from his subject. In this poem, Ezekiel's irony dramatizes the peasant's, as well as the
speaker's father's, superstition in their desperate attempts to save the speaker's mother. The
speaker does not see the peasants in a positive light and instead compares them to "swarms of flies"
in their desperation to help his mother (8). Their mixture of Christianity and Hinduism allows for
slight confusion, as they pray to God for the mother's wellbeing yet also hope for the best in her
reincarnations. The speaker highlights how futile their spiritual efforts were in helping his mother:
"My mother twisted through and through / groaning on a mat" (32-33). While this perspective does
reflect a slight elitism—the speaker is looking down on the peasants for believing what they
believe—it also indicates the religious and cultural diversity that India holds. In this way, "Night of
the Scorpion" is a quintessentially Indian poem in that it shows the meeting of worlds through a
sense of community ties after a specific disastrous event.
Though "Night of the Scorpion" does not use the strict formal structures that Ezekiel had used in his
earlier poetry, this does not mean that the poem is not rhythmic or musical. The punctuation and
enjambment of the lines cause the poem to flow in the large first stanza. This helps to build tension
and make a large block of text easier and more pleasant to read. For example, the descriptions of
the peasants looking for the scorpion contain an easy internal rhythm: "With candles and with
lanterns / throwing giant scorpion shadows / on the sun-baked walls / they searched for him: he was
not found" (11-14). These lines start out in an even rhythm (with CAN-dles and with LAN-terns),
which is broken by the colon, and the depressing revelation that the scorpion was not found. In this
way, the careful variation of rhythm throughout "Night of the Scorpion" helps Ezekiel achieve
different emotional effects.
Finally, this poem communicates a tension between urban living and the natural world that Ezekiel
returns to again and again in this work. The speaker's community, which lives close together and
keeps itself informed about its residents, rose up in this work to surround the mother as she burned.
The antagonist of the poem is the scorpion, who is forgiven by the speaker very early on since he
was indoors simply for survival: "Ten hours / of steady rain had driven him / to crawl beneath a sack
of rice" (2-4). In this way, the true force of chaos and evil is the rain, which drove the scorpion
indoors and beats down upon the speaker and his family throughout their ordeal: "More candles,
more lanterns, more neighbours, / more insects, and the endless rain" (30-31). Like "Monsoon
Madness," the natural world is a force of its own in "Night of the Scorpion" and is directly
responsible for all of the characters' troubles.

Poems of Nissim Ezekiel:

Nissim Ezekiel's collected poems were first anthologized in 1992 by Oxford India Paperbacks. Since
then, Oxford University Press has published three impressions and two editions of the anthology.
The second edition, published in 2007, contains a preface by Leela Gandhi and an introduction by
John Thieme. The collection contains all of Ezekiel's major published work from 1952 to 1988. The
anthology includes every work that Ezekiel has published in those years, including the collections A
Time to Change (1952), Sixty Poems (1953), The Third (1958), The Unfinished Man (1960), The Exact
Name (1965), Hymns in Darkness (1976), and Latter-Day Psalms (1982). The Collected Poems also
include poems from stretches of time in which Ezekiel did not publish his poetry in specific
collections: Poems (1965-1974), Poems Written in 1974, and Poems (1983-1988).
When read from cover to cover, the Collected Poems show Ezekiel's evolution as a poet from the
ages of 28 to 62. Ezekiel's early work is very concerned with form and contains strict rhyme and
meter schemes. Additionally, they are all written in "proper" English and place themselves within a
Western literary tradition. As Ezekiel aged, his focus shifted towards his home country, India, and his
poems become much more local and specific. Additionally, about halfway through his career, Ezekiel
made the choice to move away from using strict poetic form in his poetry. As the form loosened in
his poems, so did the register. Ezekiel's free verse flows with ease and confidence in his later work.
It is natural that Ezekiel's poetry should change over the course of his very long career, which
spanned four decades in this anthology. It is interesting, however, how many of Ezekiel's themes
stay the same. Young or old, Ezekiel's poetics are fascinated with bodies and nakedness, particularly
the bodies of beautiful women. Additionally, his poems across his career juggle dualities and
paradoxes. Norman Ross E. makes this point in "Nissim Ezekiel's Vision of Life and Death": "All of
Ezekiel's work is concerned with the dichotomy of human processes: Word and Silence; Love and
Sex; Urban and Rural; and most especially, Life and Death."

The emotional effect of Ezekiel's poems heightens when there is a contradiction. This is particularly
evident when it comes to the types of voices and registers that he chooses to employ, particularly
later in his career. As the middle-class subjects of his poems go about their privileged and happy
lives, they interact with servants and the poor in a variety of ways. Their response to the poor
people's existence, from boastful generosity to rueful kindness, contrasts with the kinds of things
they say about them behind closed doors. Ezekiel offers a look through those doors, despite the fact
that he too comes from a privileged background.

Additionally, many scholars see Ezekiel as a poet that is deeply immersed in particular attention to
place, especially when it comes to the city. Each of his poems is endowed with the characteristics of
where it is set. Those poems that turn towards descriptions of the speaker's surroundings are often
the most beautiful. As Vinay Lal notes in "A No Mean Poet of the Mean" that Ezekiel is "a poet of the
city" who "has stridden the streets of Bombay, and reveled in the sensuous and inimitable pleasures
of the companionship of women."

Because Ezekiel was already a well-known poet by the time he was a senior citizen, the Collected
Poems were highly anticipated when they were first published. The sheer number of re-prints and
editing that it has enjoyed over the years speaks to its popularity as an anthology.