Poetry and versification: the burden of commitment the volume, the “spider” of the last line standing for the poet who has spun
these webs. The third line of the poem, which tells of the sun coming down
in “stately visit” to the poet, suggests the shamanistic power of poetry to
move even the world of nature and the elements; thus, the image seems
to be in accordance with the strong orphic strain of much of Soyinka’s
poetry. However, the suggestion of a beatific visitation of the Muse is at
odds with the tumultuous, bloody passage rites and the contradictoriness
that the title poem of the volume, “Idanre,” give to Soyinka’s muse, Ogun.
As we have learned from Soyinka and his critics over the decades, this
Yoruba god of war and lyric poetry, of destruction and creation, is not
a Muse who comes to his favored devotees in the quiescent majesty of
an untroubled royal visitation. Even far more incongruous to what we
have come to associate with Soyinka’s poetry in the decades since the
publication ofIdanre and Other Poemsis the conceit in the second line of
this preface poem which speaks both of the poetic act and its end product
as means with which “to quiver lightly and to fly.” Many of the poems in
the sections titled “of birth and death” and “for women” are poems of
tenderness and whimsy, but they do not evince the tremulousness evoked
by the “lightly quivering” imagery, just as the thundering stanzas of
“Idanre,” the title poem, are anything but ethereal. Indeed, the passage
rites which literally and symbolically organize the poems in the volume
receive their distinctive texture from brooding, strife-torn myths, from
landscapes of grief, decay and alienation, and from tortured quests for
wholeness and regeneration.
In thus presenting us with a Soyinka we do not now easily recognize,
this preface poem inIdanrein effect shows that the critical act is often
wise only belatedly, prescient only when time and accumulated commen-
taries enable a wide-angled view of the forest of the total poetic corpus
containing individual “trees” of single poems or clusters of poems. For if
the particular poetic “tree” which this preface poem represents does not
look anything like the “forest” of vintage Soyinka poetry, this is neither
a cause for regret – “why aren’t most of his poems this accessible and
coherent” – nor for gratified and uncritical celebration – “who would
have thought, from this annunciation of the preface poem to his first
volume of poems, that he would go on to write poems which would at-
tempt nothing short of the exploration of the self-encounter of a whole
nation and an entire continent in the modern world, at both the most
private levels and the most public contexts?” Rather, what this preface
poem in Soyinka’s first published volume of poetry nudges us towards is
a preparedness, in a fresh critical review and evaluation of the Nigerian