Commonwealth Poetry

 The child narrator of poem come with his father for funeral of his granny. The village grandmother lived is far far away with hard destination. Because of that father and son reached too late to the funeral. At the moment granny's body take away. That night child saw the father on bed look at the wall and crying secretly and silently. This is how he express hidden sorrow. This poem's setting is uncleaned landscape and hard roads in the Indian village. Characterization is minimal. It's characters are Indian. Major characters are a father and a son. Maybe grandmother. But she was dead. Minor characters are neighbors, cousins, relatives, friends and other closers who came to funeral. The plot of this poem is Mahapatra emphasizes psychological grief, toleration acceptance of sorrow as it is. And the conflict in the poem is narrow roads among fields where father and son couldn't walk. They are fill with disgusting animals like like crabs, snails. And also it is a dark time

 The poem opens with a scene of the poet and his father come to an Indian Village in a crowded bus. Bus fare in India is cheap. But travelling is tough. People packed into train and buses. They have more pains on bad roads in rural areas. They pushed here and there inside a vehicle. When one person want to get off from the bus others in bus face troubles.  This is a rainy day. Rivers are full of water. People can't cross rivers because there are no bridges. Fields are full of disgusting animals like crabs and snails. So travelling becomes more harder. Father and son want to reach for a funeral. But travelling is difficult.  India is still a developing country. Infrastructure Facilities in that country are no good. It is tedious and time wasting. That's why poet says " going through all this '' It shows the extent of difficultness. It was a menace for both father and son. They become late for funeral. Both father and son are very difficult to reach destination. Gra

 In Ezekiel's Night Of The Scorpion we meet the poem  in free verse.  In comparison with the Eliot's Preludes   there is a minor difference between Eliot and Ezekiel too. Eliot in keeping with the traditional practice of writing poetry, begins his lines with capital letters. Ezekiel does not do that. He uses capital letters only for the beginning of sentences. This is a new practice initiated to poetry in the twentieth century. That however is only a minor structural difference. Another  difference we can observe is the absence of stanzas in the poem. The whole incident is narrated in one chunk of a passage. Only the mother's comment, which does not form a part of the incident is given separately. This is right because them other's comment is the only lyrical part of the poem. It carries the mother's love with it. The rest of the poem is narrative. And also poem has understandable absence of regular rhythm and rhyme.  The poem is not lyric. It is narrative. As we se

  A scorpion bit the poet's mother in a heavily rainy night. The Indian Neighbors flock around her to treat her. Their treatments were rather weird and primitive. The poet's father tried more sophisticated methods but to no avail. The mother suffered for twenty hours till poison in her lost its siting. At the end the mother said: '' Thank God the scorpion pricked on me and spared my children. The mood or tone carries throughout the poem is reflective. This poem has religious and superstitious background and the message of genuine motherhood. The conflict of the poem carries how scorpion stung a mother, how she protect from it and what kind of a love mother has towards children. Dark and evil side of this poem is the image of poisonous tail. Also sun baked walls and the night are cruel images. The poem carries spatial setting of an Indian countryside. This poem carries situation in a night time and wet climate after rain. Poet remembered his past childhood memories. Scor

I remember the night my mother was stung by a scorpion. Ten hours of steady rain had driven him to crawl beneath a sack of rice. Parting with his poison - flash of diabolic tail in the dark room - he risked the rain again. The peasants came like swarms of flies and buzzed the name of God a hundred times to paralyse the Evil One. With candles and with lanterns throwing giant scorpion shadows on the mud-baked walls they searched for him: he was not found. They clicked their tongues. With every movement that the scorpion made his poison moved in Mother's blood, they said. May he sit still, they said May the sins of your previous birth be burned away tonight, they said. May your suffering decrease the misfortunes of your next birth, they said. May the sum of all evil balanced in this unreal world against the sum of good become diminished by your pain. May the poison purify your flesh of desire, and your spirit of ambition, they said, and they sat around on the floor with my mother in t

The iambus is the meter used in most serious poetry in English. When a   poet wants to intensify that seriousness he uses the anapest. Anapest with its two unstressed syllables followed by a stresses syllable quickens the pace of a    line. The use of anapest on a basically iambic line may be occasioned by the rules of word stress as for example the meter on the first line/ing,the taw/. As the syllable /ruff/is stressed in the word 'ruffling' /ing/is not stressed. The article 'the 'being a structure word is also not stressed. In the 'tawny' the first syllable/taw/is stressed. Therefore the the third foot on the first line has to be/ling the taw/. When we come to the third and fourth lines of the first stanza the pace quickens with more and more anapestic meters used. For example the third line has a rhythm as follows: Bat/ten upon/the bloodstreams/of the veldt/The line is anapestic tetrameter. On each of the groups except the first the final syllable is stressed

The dramatic situation of the poem is the Mau Mau rebellion against the British in Kenya in the 1950s. Kenya is a country on the east coast of Africa. Kenya was a British colony.(Mau Mau was a secret society, which led the revolt of the Kikuyu tribesmen of Kenya against the British.  The  colonialists had acquired the greater part of the country's land for themselves and left only a small portion of it for the natives. The main local tribe was known as Kikuyu. The tribe under the leadership of the secret society called Mau Mau organized itself and launched a rebellion against the British settlers in 1952. the rebellion continued till 1960. During the rebellion harsh things were committed. Most of the white and black people are killed in brutal manner. The killing of a child of six with its white parents is very brutal. It shows in third stanza.         Beginning with a dramatic setting the poem opens a horrible scene of bloodshed in African territory. Bloodstreams, scattered corpse

A wind is ruffling the tawny pelt Of Africa. Kikuyu, quick as flies, Batten upon the bloodstreams of the veldt. Corpses are scattered through a paradise. Only the worm, colonel of carrion, cries: "Waste no compassion on these separate dead!" Statistics justify and scholars seize The salients of colonial policy. What is that to the white child hacked in bed? To savages, expendable as Jews? Threshed out by beaters, the long rushes break In a white dust of ibises whose cries Have wheeled since civilization's dawn From the parched river or beast-teeming plain. The violence of beast on beast is read As natural law, but upright man Seeks his divinity by inflicting pain. Delirious as these worried beasts, his wars Dance to the tightened carcass of a drum, While he calls courage still that native dread Of the white peace contracted by the dead. Again brutish necessity wipes its hands Upon the napkin of a dirty cause, again A waste of our compassion, as with Spain, The gorilla wre

INTRODUCTION TO COMMONWEALTH POETRY In the nineteenth century , Britain built an empire right round the globe. The language of administration in the colonies was English. The British taught English to the natives to work in the administration. As a result a group of English educated emerged in the British colonies. Some of them mastered the language in such a way as to be able to become creative writers in it. After the colonies won their freedom in the twentieth century, they formed an association called The Commonwealth with Britain as as the head of it for their security. The creative writers in English from these countries came to be known as Commonwealth writers and those who wrote, poetry were known as Commonwealth Poets. The newly independent former colonies of Britain had their own problems. One of the biggest the Commonwealth writers encountered was their cultural schizophrenia or the split within themselves. Britain had tried to impose its own western culture along with the l