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...
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 narra...
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