Grandmother Poem Techniques

Poet is the narrator of the poem.  poem implies a story about grandmother's funeral. Poem has powerful declarative element of narration. This feature also has in the poem '' Night of the Scorpion''. Indian poets are good for storytelling. The narration in this poem carries free verse style. No regular rhyme or rhythm. This poem is not like traditional poetry starting with capital letters. stanza by stanza it has broken sentences beginning with simple letters. It shows the characteristics of contemporary poetry have free verse.

In this poem writer is not concern about regularity of rhythm and the pattern of rhyme. These are useful techniques for a poet to support the meaning of what he says. But he don't form the core of their message. Therefore these techniques are not absolutely necessary. From ignoring rhyme and rhythm  poet can freely handle language. Mahapatra in his poem Grandmother  tried to capture the natural  rhythm of an Indian speaker, which of course does not have any of the regular rhythmic patterns we encounter in traditional  poetry. For example if we take first line of the poem we cannot divide the line according to any traditional rhythmic pattern like iambic or anapestic.

But there is rhythm in breaking the line into three phrases as '' the matchbox-bus'' with the stress on '' bus, full of passengers ''with the stress on ''pa'' and ''like matches'' with the stress on ''ma''. We then also understand why the poet has not begun the the second line with a capital letter. The first  rhythmic group as much a first semantic group is up to matches. we have another set of phrases which has it own rhythm. '' the uneven road, the drizzling rain, the crossing of rivers, the narrow path, between crop fields, full of crabs and dead snails'' . Together they have not an artificial rhythm but a natural rhythm when read as phrases.

Evidence of the presence of natural rhythm is that there are no inverted phrases. the order of the phrases is the order that an Indian speaker of English would follow when speaking the language. That is what Mahapatra captures all along the poem. Mahapatra's language in the poem is conversational. That conversational character of the poet's language makes the story come alive. We feel as if the narrator is standing before us and telling us the story. poet has captured the feeling in it in typical Indian rhythms of speech.