Wole Soyinka
N ́egritudinous poems in the fourth section of the volume titled “for
women.” And this point applies as well to the six “political” poems of the
sixth section, “October ‘.” This observation generally holds true for the
“mood” poems of the fifth section, “grey seasons,” if exception is made
for an indication of vegetative myths in the imagery of the third poem of
the section, “Season.” Indeed in love poems like “Psalm” and “Her Joy
is Wild,” in place of the tantalizingly enigmatic mythic fragments which
make even a short, revisionary sonnet like “Dawn” the despair of anti-
mythologizing exegetes, what we have is a cluster of rather conventional
sexual imagery of a kind only very infrequently seen in Soyinka’s poetry
and drama. An apt example of this is the following scrambled group of
couplets from “Psalm” which casts what appears to be a sexual union of
two lovers not only in conventionalized imagery but also in an artificial
rhyming scheme that ends in an apparently unintended bathos in the
quatrain concluding the seven couplets making up the main body of the
poem:
Swaddlings of my gratitude
Stir within your plenitude
Moist the quickening consciousness
Sealed in warm mis-shapennness...
Sealed in earth your sanctuary
Yields to light, and a mystery
Of pulses and the stranger life
Comes to harvest and release
The germ of life exegesis
Inspiration of your genesis (IOP,)It must in fairness be acknowledged that these rather awkward lines
come from a poem which probably was part of the corpus of recitations
and songs that Soyinka performed in his very first “outing” as a fledgling
dramatist, poet and actor on the stage of the Royal Court Theatre. But if
the other “recitations” and “songs” in the cycle of “for women” are not as
awkward in their metrical and rhyming schemes and as sentimental and
conventional in their imagery as “Psalm,” neither do they show Soyinka
at his best as a lyric poet. That distinction falls to poems in which the
confidence and wonder in his own ardent intuitions and original insights
find arresting, memorable expression either in entirely new and fresh
imagery, or in the poet’s inspired reworking of conventional imagery and