Symbols and Images in Nissim Ezekiel’s Poetry

Ezekiel uses symbols and imagery in strictly functional sense and not for decoration. Through his symbols and images he makes the abstract concrete. In "Enterprise" journey symbolises journey of life and it also stands for the voyage into one's inner self, the voyage of self-exploration. "Home" symbolises the place where one lives, as also one's inner self. "Night of the Scorpion" is a symbolic juxtaposition of the forces of darkness and light. Darkness gives way to evil in the form of scorpion: 

“Ten hours 

of steady rain had driven him 

to crawl beneath a sack of rice 

parting with his poison-flash of diabolic tall in the dark room 

he risked the rain again.” 

The continuous rain stands for hope and regeneration. But the evil, having fulfilled its part, departs. Other hurdles come in: 

“More candles, more lanterns, more neighbours

more insects, and the endless rain 

My mother twisted through and through 

groaning on a mat.” 

See the accurate placing of words, evoking the symbols of light and darkness-"Candles"/lanterns"- “neighbours"/"insects", and "the rain" again. But the force of life gains an upper hand over the evil and life is restored once again: 

“After twenty hours 

it lost its sting.”

The ever recurring images in Ezekiel's poetry are the woman, the city and the nature. He weaves a number of associative images around these key images. The image of the pagan woman who is a great beast of sex recurs in his poems. She symbolises mean passion, earthly corruption and defilement. Various organs of the female body-the breasts and thighs, flesh and hair, belly and torso, bone and marrow, lung and liver and eyes -which are both enticing and repelling at one and the same time, are graphically described. "Motives" presents fine evocative images of various parts of feminine body, which suggests intense sexuality: 

“It's easy to remember 

your body in its nakedness. 

Í dwell on it as on a landscape 

or a beloved painting 

Not the total form only 

but the details interest me. 

My motives are sexual, 

aesthetic and friendly 

in that order, adding up 

to bed with you.” 

"The Female Image" symbolises the sexual exploitation of girls: 

“There 

He will watch the virgin 

Wear his fever, wait or turn 

Arrange her limbs as he desires, 

For so he sees the female image, 

on the lonely pillow in the single room." 

In "Description" the poet concentrates on the single image its multiple associations. The image of the pagan woman is closely associated with the image of the city, both being symbols of corruption and defilement. In "A Morning Walk" the city is presented in all its horror and ugliness: 

“Barbaric city sick with slums, 

Deprived of seasons, blessed with rains, 

Its hawkers, beggars, iron-lunged, 

Processions led by frantic drums, 

A million purgatorial lanes, 

And child-like masses many-tongued, 

Whose images are in words and crumbs.” 

"Urban" is candid statement of the bewilderment and disillusionment of the city dwellers. The city is the central image around which are woven associate images of "broken roads", the dry river, dead wind, dawn, night, sun, rain, wave of sand, traffic, beach, tree and stone. Adil Jussawala remarks: "the city becomes a hell and it is one of Ezekiel's achievements that without being quaintly lurid or straining for exotic effects, he represents it as the hopeless Indian hell it is".

The images of natural objects-hills, rivers, winds, skies, sun and rain are set in opposition to the images of the city. The images derived from the world of nature the archetypal life symbols. In the words of K. D. Verma : "They project a pastoral vision of a fully refulgent and harmonious life, a pattern in which man enters into sacred communion with his cosmos including objects of nature as a metaphoric condition of his integrated humanity and of his desire to foster a community of being". Nature imagery is juxtaposed to the image of the barbaric city in "Urban", “Morning Walk" and "Morning Prayer".

Ezekiel skilfully evokes graphic pictures of human life with the help of apt images and symbols, derived from nature: 

“Shall I be 

driven before them 

like a maddened 

dog or horse.” (“Furies") 

and again : 

“I am like a pelican of the wild- 

erness, like an owl of the de- 

sert, like a sparrow alone 

upon the house top-but not in 

misery.”