Page 192 - DENG201_ENGLISH_II

English - II

Notes scepticism but rather the exact notation of what he saw as a child. The aim is not to explain but to
make real by naming, by saying ‘common things’. The poem is a new direction, a vision of ordinary
reality, especially of Indian life, unmediated by cold intellect. The new purpose is seen in the poem’s
style, unrhymed, with line lengths shaped by natural syntactical units and rhythm created by the
cadences of the speaking voice into a long verse paragraph, rather than the stanzaic structure used in
earlier poems.
In his poetry there is the truth of acknowledging what is felt and experienced in its complexity,
contradictions, pleasures, fears and disillusionments without preconceived ideas of what poetry should
say about the poet and life.
Nissim Ezekiel’s ‘Night of The Scorpion’ is much appreciated by the critics and it has found place in
many anthologies for as excellence, Critics, commenting on its aesthetic beauty expressed different
views. In their critical sweep, they brought everything from superstitious ritualism to modern
rationalism. One can find that in the poem superstitious ritualism or sceptic rationalism or even the
balance of the both with expression of Indian ethos through maternal love in the Indian way, is
nothing but scratching the surface.
The poem has something more gigantic than its face value, which as I find is the symbolic juxtaposition
of the forces of darkness and light that is intrinsically centripetal in the poem.
It is ‘Night’ of The Scorpion’ with the first word absorbing accent. It seems to have been implicitly
contrived here that ‘Night should stand as a symbol of darkness with the ‘Scorpion’ as the symbol of
evil. Such ingenuity in craftsmanship takes the poem to the higher level of understanding. Prof. Birje
Patil is right in putting that in “Night of The Scorpion”, where evil is symbolized by the scorpion, The
reader made to participate in the ritual as well as suffering through’ a vivid evocation of the poison
moving in the mother’s blood’. And evil has always been associated with darkness, the seamy side of
our life, in human psyche. It has always been the integral part of theology, in whatever form it has
manifested that suffering helps in removing that darker patch in human mind, he patch that has been
a besetting sin of man’s existence.
May the sum of evilBalanced in this unreal world against the sum of goodbecome diminished by
your pain, they said These lines amply testify that the poem aims at achieving something higher than
its narrative simplicity. The choric refrain ‘they said’ in the chain of reactions made by the village
peasants is undoubtedly ironic, but the poet hasn’t as much to stress the concept of sin, redemption
or rebirth as he has to insinuate the indomitable force of darkness gripping the minds of the
unenlightened. Going through the poem attentively more than once, it can’t fail catching our notice
that modern rationalism is also equally shallow and perverse. It is also a road leading to confusion
where through emerges scepticism, the other darker patch on our modernized existence. The image
of the father in this poem speaks volumes for this capsizing modernism which sandwiches in its arm-
space the primitive and the perverted. The “sceptic rationalist’ father trying ‘powder, mixture, herb
and hybrid’ bears upon human primitivism and when he experiments with ‘a little paraffin upon a
bitten toe and put a match to it he becomes a symbol of perversion in the modern man’s psyche.
Christopher Wiseman puts it, “...a fascinating tension between personal crisis and mocking social
observation”” ; neither there is any personal crisis. On the other hand there is spiritual compassion and
an intense urge for getting rid of this psychological syndrome that the whole modern world has been
caught, the slow-moving poison of this syndromic scorpion into the very veins of creation, the image of
the mother in agony nullifying the clear vision of human thought and enveloping the whole of humanity
In the darker shades of confusion more chaolic, troubles the poet as much sharply as the sting of the
poisonous worm. There is crisis, but it is the crisis of human existence that needs lo be overcome. The
poet, though a distant observer, doesn’t take a stance of detachment. On the exact opposite, he watches
with curiosity “the flame feeding on my mother’, but being uncertain whether the paraffin flame
would cleanse her of the ugony of the absorbing poison, he loses himself in a thoughtful trance. The
whole poem abounds with these two symbols of darkness and light. In the very beginning the poet

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