Wole Soyinka
take at least half a decade before it blossomed into a generally coherent
and all-encompassing philosophy of life and art in Soyinka’s later theo-
retical writings like the essay, “The Fourth Stage” and some of the pieces
collected inMyth, Literature and the African World. The great spiritual and
epistemological awakening implied here is the recognition, at last, that
the monotony and repetitiousness inherent in the figure of the cycle – as
in the image of the tail-devouring serpent – as a symbol of history and
human existence subsists within a larger cosmic order which involves the
duality of decay and renewal, destruction and creation. This awakening
of the young poet-philosopher takes the form, in the poems collected in
this first volume of his poetry, of an extremely tenuous and contradiction-
ridden “coherence.” And if this is true of the title poem, it is even truer
of the “unity” between the seven sections making up the entire volume.
Thus, the challenge to the critic who comes to the poems inIdanre
more than thirty years after their publication, is neither to succumb, as
some critics have done, to the notion that a mythographic unity and
coherence is given to the entire volume by the title poem, nor to dis-
miss outright the fact that many “mythemes” loosely and suggestively
connect many poems in the volume, from poems expressing deeply felt
private perceptions, intuitions and emotions to poems of open spaces,
public events, communal experiences and collective memory. Examples
of poems in the former category are “Luo Plains,” “A Cry in the Night,”
“A First Deathday,” and “To My First White Hairs,” while the latter
category is exemplified by poems like the much anthologized “Abiku,”
“Season,” “Night” and the six poems in the penultimate section of the
volume, “October ‘.” Indeed, it is instructive in this regard to compare
“A First Deathday” which is a very private poem about the recollected
death of the poet’s sibling, Folashade, in infancy (told briefly but movingly
inAk ́e) with “Abiku,” a poem on a figure in Yoruba cosmology and one
of the most successful and widely acclaimed poems of Soyinka. Beyond
this, it is also instructive to see how “mythemes” which are only frag-
mentarily explored in these two poems are vastly amplified inThe Road
to give hints that there is in Soyinka’s corpus some kind of intertextual
poetic discourse between these diverse texts of verse and drama.
The two poems “A First Deathday” and “Abiku” derive from totally
different emotional matrices, yet they both register and celebrate will as a
phenomenon linked to mystical, transcendent and sometimes malevolent
forces of the cosmos. “Grief has long receded,” the much older, adult
poet tells us in the fourth line of “A First Deathday,” but the bereavement
experienced in childhood lingers and is very subtly registered in the way