Wole Soyinka
To forestall a charge that this “simple” poetic reprise of a children’s
propitiation song has been “over-read,” let us address the contextual
pertinence of this reading to an assessment of the scope and nature of
Soyinka’s performance as a lyric poet in this volume. Pain, grief, loss
and more grandiosely, violence, terror and alienation, are the subjects
of many of the poems in the volume, not as abstractions but as either
experiences conveyed with skintight intimacy or with projective iden-
tification with others in lone, single experiences or general communal
calamities. The justly celebrated and widely discussed “Death in the
Dawn” records the poet’s encounter with the road crash death of an un-
known fellow traveler in an elegy which is deeply affecting in the way in
which the poem delicately captures the hopeful portents felt by all dawn
travelers only to end in a gruesome death and its chastening dramatiza-
tion of the futility of those portents. “A Cry in the Night” is wrenching
in its evocation of the unabating grief of a mother burying her stillborn
child in the vast loneliness of the night in which her bereavement seems
hers and hers alone in an empty universe; but her grief is actually shared
by the unperceived poet, whose silent but deep sympathetic acknowl-
edgment of her bereavement gives meaning to the event by memori-
alizing it. The poems in the cycle “October ‘,” the most “public”
pieces in the volume, are affecting because the diverse experiences of
fear, terror, hate and creeping derangement of social cohesion and de-
cency which they record as Nigeria moved ever closer to a fratricidal
civil war, are rendered with the best effects of lyric poetry: intensely per-
sonal and deeply felt emotion, concrete and arresting images, startling
anchoring of abstract, general ideas in fresh, vivid and memorable use of
language.
Poetry, including especially lyric poetry, can contain such extremely
contradictory intuitions and emotions because in its sheer delight in
language and its semantic, phonetic and ideational resources, it often
goes to the roots of words and based on this, it has the capacity to
hermiticize within a single episode or passage tropes, metaphors and
sentiments from diverse and conflicting domains of life and experience.
Lyric poetry of this type pervades Soyinka’s dramas, most notablyA
Dance,The Road,MadmenandThe Bacchae of Euripides. Moreover, in the
generically more capacious framework of his great dramatic parables,
techniques and idioms of the lyric which in Soyinka’s formal verse seem
to stand in truncated and splendid isolation weld into arresting clusters
and configurations of powerful emotions and intuitions which encompass
disparate, or even conflicting aspects and domains of life. The following