Wole Soyinka
following quote is fairly representative of the unintended poetic solecisms
of this section:
There are air-beams unfelt by human breath
Unseen by sight, intangible. Whose throat
Draws breath in a god’s preserve
Breathes the heart of fire
Murderer, stay your iron hand
Your men lie slain – Cannibal!
Ay, ring summons on the deafened god
His fingers sow red earth. His being incarnate
Bathes in carnage, anoints godhead
In carnage.
(IOP,)If there is a moral to the repetition of the word “carnage” in this passage,
it is surely that the follies and foibles of humankind assume colossal
dimensions when yoked to transcendent idealities encoded in the deities,
idealities which, after all, are none other than the projections of our own
natural propensities, of drives and passions rooted deep in our natures.
The Aristotelian moment ofanagnorisis, of recognition of this insight by
the poet-witness of the “carnage” is one of the few instances in this section
when the strain of fustian rhetoric gives way to an almost quiescent
antistrophe:
Light filled me then, intruder though
I watched a god’s excorsis; clearly
The blasphemy of my humanity rose accusatory
In my ears, and understanding came
Of a fatal condemnation...
Life, the two-cowrie change of the dealer
In trinkets lay about him in broken threads
Oh the squirrel ran up an iroko tree
And the hunter’s chase
Was ended (–)The deliberate, almost quiescent bathos of the lines of the second stanza
is intended as a contrast to the soaring language of lines which express the
tragic grandeur of moments like Ogun’s triumph where the other deities
had failed to effect reunion with mankind. Consequently, the humility
that the chastened god experiences after the carnage leads to the true
moment ofanagnorisis, of recognition, in the entire poem – the moment
in the sixth section when the poet comes to an awareness that the break