Commonwealth Poetry

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. ...

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...