Ezekiel's "Night Of The Scorpion"

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On Nissim Ezekiel’s “Night of the Scorpion” The speaker recalls the night when a scorpion stung his mother. Ten hours of heavy rain forced the scorpion to crawl under a sack of rice. Perhaps the speaker’s mother went near the sack to get some rice for cooking. The room was dark. The scorpion with its devilish tail stung the mother in a flash and went away. The peasants or villagers came into the speaker’s hut. The poet compares them with flies and insects: they came like “swarms of flies/and buzzed the name of God”. They wanted to paralyse the evil scorpion. They thought that if they could paralyse the scorpion, the poison in the mother’s body would not spread. With candles and lanterns they searched for the scorpion; but it was not found. The poet also compares the villagers with the scorpion. He says that the light of the candles and lanterns created huge shadows of the villagers. The shadows looked like giant scorpions. The villagers “clicked their tongues” to pretend that they had real sympathy for the speaker’s mother. They said that the poison moved in the mother’s body according to the movement of the scorpion. So they prayed for the scorpion to remain still. Then they prayed that the present suffering of the mother might burn away the sins of her previous birth and decrease the misfortunes of her next birth. They also prayed that the sum of her wrong doings might be balanced against the sum of her good deeds; and that the poison might cleanse herself of her earthly desires and ambitions. The mother struggled with pain. The villagers sat around her. There was no anxiety in their faces. It seemed, as if they knew everything. The number of the neighbours increased. People came with more candles and lanterns. The poet again compares them with insects. As insects gather in attraction of light, the villagers gathered in attraction of the misfortune of the
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