Through the poem there is a philosophical debate, dichotomy is used especially in the father as the poet says "My father, sceptic rationalist trying every curse and blessing" his father is well educated but because of the stress of losing his wife he is trying desperately to save her. He even uses religion to save her though he doesn't believe in it, showing her is doing everything he can.
Night of the scorpion is almost one long stanza except three of the last lines; the three last lines tell us what happens after the night. I think Ezekiel uses this structure because it gives a long verse which gives the impression of a long night, and the three lines at the end give a bit of relief for the stressful night. Search for my tongue is only one stanza but it is split into three sections by a chunk of Gujerati in the middle. The Gujerati sandwich shows that Gujerati is in the centre of her life and she hasn't forgotten her mother tongue so it is very important to her.
In ‘Night of the Scorpion’ the peasants use incantations, which suggests a simplistic belief system.
The line “My father sceptic, rationalist, trying every curse and blessing” shows that his father obviously believes in western rationalism but in the heat of the moment he decides to try every thing including Easton culture. I think the point of the poem is that Ezekiel’s mother recovers. However in the poem Ezekiel is also challenging western culture, because western culture tries to explain everything but we don’t know if Ezekiel’s mother would have got better without these “blessings” or if it was the “blessings” that saved the mother.
Since both these poems tell a story of a different kind of battle but both are important events in their lives. Both these poems show how they over came there fears, one of losing their mother the other losing their first language, both these things are at the core of their lives and if they wrote about them because of this.
These are both terrible things to loose if they lost them, if Nissim Ezekiel lost his mother he would be loosing a very important thing to him as he was only young and in most cultures young children are most often cared by their mother. If Sujata Bhatt lost her mother tongue she would find it hard to express her self, as she doesn't really know the foreign tongue so she would not be able to express herself and she would problem feel as if she has lost a big part of her life.
In conclusion search for my tongue makes her poem real by making the tongues in her mouth sound real, as it is not normal to have to tongues in your mouth. She tries to make us feel the same way she does by putting Gujerati in the middle so we have to read it and we don't know what it means, but she helps us by putting the words into sounds so we can try to read it.
At the end of the poem she shows growth like a plant by saying "grows longer, grows moist, grows strong veins" which is very visual, she also says “the bud opens in my mouth" and "it blossoms" showing the appearance of flowers blooming. This shows she’s happy as life is renewing itself.
Night of the scorpion tells us a night, which he is unhappy about, because his mother has been stung by a scorpion. The poem is like a short story telling us the battle for his mothers’ life, a battle of good and evil. In the end his mother lives and she says "Thank god the scorpion picked me and spared my children" which shows her love for her children as she has been through awful pain and she could have said how evil and terrible this scorpion was.
