According to M.K. Naik, a major shaping factor in Ezekiel's poetry is that he belonged to a Bene - Israel family which migrated to India generations ago. Thus “substantially alienated from the core of the Indian ethos”, Ezekiel was acutely aware of this alienation by the fact that he had spent most of his life in highly westernized circles in cosmopolitan Bombay. With Marathi (on his own admission) as his “lost mother tongue” and English as his “second mother tongue”, Ezekiel's quest for integration made for a restless career of quick changes and experiments including “philosophy, poverty and poetry” in a London basement room - and even a spell of working as a factory manager - before he settled down as a university teacher in his “bitter native city”.
His autobiographical poem, Background, Casually gives an emphatic expression, though in a satirical vein, to his social and cultural alienation from the country to which he does not belong but which he has adopted as his own. He tells us that he had attended a Roman Catholic school where he found himself:
A mugging Jew among the wolves.
They told me I had killed the Christ.
He informs us that a Muslim sportsman had boxed his ears as a consequence of which he had grown up in terror of strongly built boys. The Hindu boys, he says, tormented him in their own way; and one day he was compelled to produce a knife to threaten the boys who were persecuting him. This sense of alienation, begun at school, clung to Ezekiel throughout his life despite his best efforts to come to terms with his country and its people. He made a commitment to live in this country and to adapt himself to the conditions prevailing in Bombay even though he strongly disapproved of and disliked them. The transitions in his career gave rise to a feeling of frustration and he wrote: “I knew I had failed in everything.”
“The alienation theme is thus central to Ezekiel's work and colours his entire poetic universe,” says Naik. This explains his early fascination with Rilke, though he learnt his poetic craft from Eliot and Auden, whom he frequently echoes in his early verse. “A refugee of the spirit” in search of his “dim identity”, which in different moods appears to him to be either a “one man lunatic asylum” or “a small deserted holy place”, Ezekiel experiments with three different solutions to his problem.
The easiest way out was a protective assumption of easy superiority expressing itself in surface irony as in his Very Indian Poems in Indian English in which the obvious linguistic howlers of Indian students are pilloried with metropolitan snobbishness. The characters who speak in these and similar poems are an Indian patriot, a retired professor, the office - bearer of an employees’ association and a railway clerk in The Patriot, The Professor, Goodbye Party for Miss Pushpa T.S. and The Railway Clerk respectively. Viewed superficially, these poems may appear to be casual, ironic exercises exploiting the obvious humour arising from the common misuse of word and phrase, tense and preposition, syntax and idiom by Indians in their use of the English language, Ezekiel's attitude in these poems is not merely that of an amused observer but of a man who is repelled by the “Babu Angrezi” or “Hinglish” by the so - called educated Indians.
Ezekiel's alienation from the Indian ethos also appears in his depiction of conditions in contemporary society like the charlatans who pose as godmen and dupe and fleece their superstitious, blind followers. He asks:
“If saints are like this
What hope is there then for us?”
Then we have students distributing biscuits to the flood - affected villagers in The Truth About the Floods; the highly sexed Muslim girl more interested in the “pictures in a certain kind of book” in How the English Lessons Ended; a prostitute On Bellasis Road; the maidservant with loose morals in Ganga; the flirtatious Indian husbands and their shy wives at an international party in In India; and the Poverty Poem in which a foreigner does not know that “beggars in India smile out at white foreigners”. Ezekiel's alienation from his own Jewish community is evident in the poem Jewish Wedding in Bombay in which he mocks at the emptiness of the Jewish ritual and the hypocrisy of orthodoxy and in which he also emphasizes the disillusionment which marriage and sexual relationship bring.
In a more generous mood, Ezekiel gives himself the testimonial of being “a good native” and tells himself (perhaps more loudly than is necessary):
“I cannot leave this island
I was born here and belong.”
Then despair takes over and he ruefully accepts his failure (in Rilke's words) “to weave himself more closely into things”, and confesses, “My backward place is where I am.” This feeling of alienation has been the motivating force behind his poetry.
Ezekiel has not completely succeeded, however, in transforming his feeling of alienation into any major poetic utterance, except perhaps in Night of the Scorpion, which, according to Naik, is “one of the finest poems in recent Indian English literature”. Here, the tale, which lies in the sting, is told by an observer, who is neither flippantly ironical nor antiseptically detached. On the contrary, he invests the poem with deep significance by trying to understand the Indian ethos and its view of evil and suffering, though he makes no claim to sharing it.
Ezekiel's poetry reveals technical skill of a high order. Except in his later work where his choice of an open from sometimes makes for looseness, he has always written verse which is extremely tightly constructed. His mastery of the colloquial idiom is matched by a sure command of rhythm and rhyme. A happy use of cool understatement (e.g., “A certain happiness would be to die”) and a lapidary quality have made him one of the most quotable poets of his generation (e.g., “Home is where we have to gather grace”). Though hardly a poet with the shatteringly original image, he employs the extended metaphor effectively in poems like Enterprise.
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