Night of the Scorpion

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Night of the Scorpion is a poem by Nissim Ezekiel.

It tells the story of a time when Nissim was a child and his family lived in Bombay in India. One day, his mother was stung by a scorpion, which then retreats behind a sack of rice. The poem describes the attempts by Nissim's father, the local peasants and the holy man to cure her, far away from Western medicine. The conflict between the peasants "buzzing the name of God" and Nissim's father, "sceptic, rationalist, trying every curse and blessing" because he is willing to try anything to save his wife, is the centre of the poem.Her mother also thanked god that the scorpion had speared her children and stung her.This doesn't help though, since the poisons effects subside by itself "After twenty hours it lost its sting".

The poem has been included in Cluster 1 of the AQA Anthology for study at GCSE in the section Poems from other Cultures.

Language

This poem uses 3 types of language:

1)Factual tone- used to portray the facts. It's a neutral, straightforward way of telling a story.

2)First person narrative- portrays the story through the eyes of Nissim as a child and shows that we are seeing exactly what he did.

3)Religious language- used to portray the views of the community and peasants.

The religious language contrasts with the factual language suggesting the poets view that religion is a waste of time as it is not factual.

Interpritations

Th frst stanza ends in the line "After 20 hours it lost its sting." This line could be read into two different ways: The most common interpritaion is that the after 20 hours, despite "every curse or blessing", it literally stops hurting. Another Interpritation is that the mother dies; after 20 hours of agony it lost its sting as she couldn't feel anything. This could also be implied in the last section where it says "the only thing my mother said" which could mean the only thing she got to say about it before she died was that it didn't get her children so that they could live on. The other meaning would be that the other section was about what everyone else was saying while the mother was in agony and the small sectioned bit was what the mother said in comparison.