Poetry and versification: the burden of commitment aporetic, contradictory readings than anything we find in either poem.
In the present context, I offer two mutually opposed readings. First, at
one level, the projection of the banality and impersonality of death on
the road in this passage is underscored by Professor with an unmiti-
gated, even misanthropic despair whose intention seems to be to under-
mine the search for, and faith in hopeful portents that (all) travelers –
in actual, literal travels and metaphorically in the journey of life – start
out with and struggle to retain in the course of an actual journey or the
symbolic travel of existence. This reading is authorized by attentiveness
to the way in which Soyinka in the passage catachrestically conflates
divinatory and predatory metaphors which, in the poems inIdanreare
kept apart: “Dip in the same bowl as the man that makes his last journey
and stir with one finger, wobbling reflections of two hands” (an image
drawn from the practice of consulting an Ifa priest before setting out on
an important journey) and “Coil yourself in dreams, lay flat in treachery
and deceit and at the moment of a trusting step, rear your head and
strike the traveler in his confidence” (an image of a serpent’s fatal strike
at an unwary farmer or hunter in the bush). But another contradictory
reading of the passage is possible, one in which there is a subtle message
of stubborn, ironic hope in Professor’s bleak, nihilistic conceits: if the
road, as literal highway for commerce and travel and as metaphor for
the journey through life, is destructively treacherous, to “breathe like
the road,” to “be even like the road itself ” is to live without illusions, to
become equal to the destructiveness of the road. The first reading entails
a sympathetic projection into the ritual and sacrificial “mythemes” em-
bedded in that conflation of divinatory and predatory metaphors which
we have identified, while the second reading in fact entails a scrupulous
separation and demythologization of precisely these same metaphors.
What is important about this is the fact that such conflicting inscriptions
find in Soyinka’s plays embodiment in memorable, riveting characters in
ways that are generically foreclosed to the isolated poem in his vol-
umes of poetry. Thus, what seems intractable or confounding in one
genre (formal verse) is almost effortlessly consummated in another genre
(drama).
Apart from “Abiku,” “A First Death-day” and the title poem “Idanre”
itself, the only other poems in this first volume of Soyinka’s poetry volume
which can be adjudged to have a heavy freight of mythologization about
them are the first two poems in the volume, “Dawn” and “Death in
the Dawn,” together with “Easter.” Definitely, there is nothing remotely
esoteric and mythologizing about the eight incredibly whimsical, almost