Night of the Scorpion : an appreciation

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The poem ‘The Night of the Scorpion’ by Nissim Ezekiel, revolves around the incidence of the poet’s mother being stung by a scorpion on a rainy night. The poem follows a narrative style where an incident is narrated in a free verse format, having no fixed rhyme scheme.

The poem is enriched using various figures of speech such as Alliteration, Antithesis, Consonance, Hyperbole, Metaphor, Onomatopoeia, Oxymoron, Personification, Repetition, Simile, and Transferred Epithet. An example of Personification is “I watched the flame feeding on my mother” where the flame is given the human quality of ‘feeding’.

The poem is a first-person account of how a son (the poet) watches helplessly as his mother suffers from the scorpion’s sting. None of the villagers’ blessings and curses, a holy man’s chants, or the rational husband’s experiments bring relief to the poet’s mother. It shows the behaviour of the villagers is characterised by their illiteracy and the lack of medical facilities, which thereby results in blind beliefs and superstitions.

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