Two Nights of Love
Introduction of the Poem:
Written in free verse, Two Nights of Love appeared in Ezekiel's second anthology, Sixty Poems (1953). Here we have curious combination of the sensuous and the spiritual, of the secular and the religious of the earthly and the heavenly. It is an interesting and intriguing poem of dualism.
Critical Summary of the Poem:
Stanza 1:
The poet here recounts his experience of lovemaking on two successive nights. After his first night of lovemaking, he merely dreams of love, having found a release from the woman's thighs and breasts. He had wanted to become a prisoner in the woman's arms, and had then wanted to have a sense of freedom.
Stanza II:
On the second night, he again makes love to the woman and experiences the strokes that the woman's thighs give him; he has a pleasurable contact with her breasts which seem to be singing a song to him. When the lovemaking is over, the poet feels exhausted but he wishes to perform the sex act again. He finds himself a slave to his desire, yet he also finds a sense of being free.
Poem Virginal
Introduction of the Poem:
The theme of this sonnet, taken from Ezekiel's Collected Poems (1989), is the predicament of a spinster. She may deceive herself by pretending that her happiness is complete but, in fact, she has denied to herself the pleasures of a happy married life and motherhood. She is really a frustrated woman.
Critical Summary of the Poem:
A spinster may pretend to be happy in her loneliness and may feel that she has done the right thing in remaining a virgin all her life, but the fact is that she remains sad. Her spinsterhood has killed her liveliness. Her sub - conscious desire to marry and give birth to a child has never really been extinct although she has never expressed it openly. The last two lines of the poem have an aphoristic quality:
The universe is much too small to hold
Your longing for a lover and a child
.webp)
