Page 191 - DENG201_ENGLISH_II

Unit 12: Poetry : Nissim Ezekiel’s Night of the Scorpion

At the end of this wait, the poetic word appears in the concrete and sensuous form of a woman, who Notes
knows that she is loved and who surrenders to her lover at once. In this process, poetry and love,
word and woman becomeinterwined. But this “slow movement” of love and poetry, which shows no
irritable haste to arrive at meaning, does not come by easily. In order to possess the vision of the rarer
birds of his psyche, the poet has to go through the “deserted lanes” of his solitary, private life; he has
to walk along the primal rivers of his consciousness in silence, or travel to a far off shore which is like
the heart’s dark floor. The poet, then, gloats on the slow curving movements of the women, both for
the sake of their sensuousness and the insights they bring. He creates his poetry out of these “myths
of light” who essential darkness or mystery remains at the entire of creation itself. But the poet finds
the greatest sense or meaning in his own creativity which eventually liberates him from”crooked
restless flight” of those moments when struggles to find the poetic idiom. The poetry which releases
the poet from suffering is the medium through which the deaf can hear and the blind see.
This is a justly celebrated poem, containing a beautiful worked set of images moving as the title
suggests, on three interpenetrating levels.

In this poem, the poet has made use of various types of imagery:
Visual imagery
• scorpion crawling beneath a sack of rice
• peasants came like swarms of flies
Smell imagery
• smell of candles
• smell of burning oil in the lanterns
Tactile experience
• scorpion biting the mother
• father pouring paraffin on the toe.
Internal sensation
• fear
• pain
Sound imagery
• buzzed the name of god a hundred times
• they clicked their tongues

12.2 Night of the Scorpion

‘Night of the Scorpion’, in which Ezekiel recalls the behaviour of ‘the peasants’, his father, his mother
and a holy man when his mother was poisoned by a scorpion’s sting. Here the aim is to find poetry
in ordinary reality as observed, known, felt, experienced rather than as the intellect thinks it should
be. While the peasants pray and speak of incarnations, his father, ‘sceptic, rationalist’, tries ‘every
curse and blessing, powder, mixture, herb and hybrid’ and a holy man performs a rite. After a day
the poison is no longer felt and, in a final irony, his mother, in contrast to the previous feverish
activity centred upon her, makes a typical motherly comment:
My mother only said
Thank God the scorpion picked on me
and spared my children.
The ‘Thank God’ is doubly ironic as it is a commonplace expression of speech in contrast to all the
previous religious and superstitious activity. Ezekiel’s purpose is not, however, an expression of

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