A Time To Change Ezekiel Analysis

The first poem in Ezekiel’s first volume published in 1952, A Time to Change is a remarkable poem. The poem is built upon the journey and quest motifs. The poem, partly a lament and partly a prayer, continually hovers around the basic concerns of the poet: moral conduct, spiritual redemption, the desires of the body and the claims of the soul. It begins with a question and ends with a sense of certainty, assurance, and hope. The poem in this sense symbolizes the poet’s spiritual journey from doubt and despair to assurance and hope. The constant conflict between the spiritual and the mundane, between the sense of the sin and the desire for the redemption, between the demands of the body and the desires of the soul leaves the poet in a state
The singing voice is the sensual self and the talking voice is the spiritual self. The poem harps on the characteristic concern of the poet about the social conduct of a moral individual. Metaphorically the poem is a quest for ‘a style of verse and life’ to ultimately ‘win redemption / in the private country of my mind’. The desire is to arrive at a golden mean, to ‘cut excesses’, and to ‘acquire the equilibrium of art’ in the passion of mind and heart as he says in another poem On an African Mask. In yet another poem, In Emptiness, Ezekiel says, ‘let me always feel/ The presence of the golden mean/ Between the Élan of desire/ And the rational faculties’. In the same poem he says ‘Let reason and emotion fare/ As man and wife; let them quarrel, / Make love or live occasionally/ Apart, and then be reconciled/ But let them not, indifferently, /Empty the house of words and music, / Partners of a marriage in
Gieve Patel in his Introduction to the Collected Poems is rather reluctant to consider Ezekiel a religious poet for the only reason that, as he says, Ezekiel ‘holds discomfiting truck with matters concerning this world’. For Ezekiel, however, spiritual inclination does not necessarily mean denial of healthy sexuality. In fact, Ezekiel’s attitude to sensual pleasure is balanced and healthy. He does not indulge in the glorification of senses as romantic poets do nor does he condemn it as many of the religious poets do. In yet another poem Ezekiel