“Virginal”, which appeared in “The Exact Name”, published in 1965, is an extraordinary and unusual extraordinary poem. It is a psychological poem which depicts the predicament of a woman who has not married and has grown old. She affects to be happy and completely satisfied with her lot but she inwardly feels melancholy because she has denied to herself the pleasures of married life and motherhood.
A man who observes her sad predicament tells her about the reality of her life. She may pretend so be happy and contented in the loneliness of her spinsterhood but in the depth of her heart she has been feeling inexpressible sadness and unhappiness, which has eclipsed her natural liveliness and vitality. The speaker says that the spinster's desire to marry and to give birth to a child had never really become extinct, although she consciously she never seemed to cherish this desire. How poignantly the narrator - speaker describes the poignant feelings of the Virginal:
You were not made to live like this, although
Your face suggests you are reconciled
Its gentle sadness as it slowly grew
And crushed your liveliness, oppressed me too
The universe is much so small to hold
Your longing for a lover and a child.
The theme of this poem is the predicament of a woman who has not got married throughout her life and has grown old to become a spinster. Such a woman may feel happy enough but she is deceiving herself if she thinks that her happiness is perfect or that she had adopted the right course in having denied to herself the pleasures of a married life and the pleasures of motherhood.
The conscious and the sub - conscious feelings of a spinster are described in this poem through a man who is to be imagined as addressing the woman and telling her what the reality of her situation is. She may pretend that she is quite happy in her life of loneliness, and that she did the right thing in having remained a virgin and not having married. But the actual fact is that she has been feeling sad without showing her sadness, and that her life of loneliness had crushed her natural liveliness (or her high spirits and her animation). In the closing two lines of this poem of fourteen lines, the speaker says that the spinster's sub - conscious desire to marry and to give birth to a child had never really become extinct even though she had never consciously been experiencing this desire, and had never, at least, expressed it even if it ever became conscious.
“Virginal” is an extraordinary poem in so far as its theme is unusual and the technique employed by Ezekiel to convey to us the sub - conscious feelings of a spinster is also unusual. The theme is unusual because in India we do not have many spinsters. In this country girls are forced into marriage at an early age by their parents, while in the west spinsterhood has become almost an institution, one reason for that being the dearth of eligible bachelors or widowers. The technique of dealing with this theme is unusual in so far as the sub - conscious longing of the spinster to have got married and to have borne a child has been conveyed to us through the mouth of a male speaker in the poem. The speaker seems to be the spinster's friend or well - wisher, and a frequent visitor, because he says that the woman's gentle sadness had not only crushed her natural animation but oppressed or depressed him too.
The poem is remarkable for its compactness of structure and its condensation of the main idea. The last two lines have an aphoristic quality:
The universe is much too small to hold
Your longing for a lover and a child.
Thus in these two lines the speaker confronts the spinster with the stark reality of her situation.