Wole Soyinka
stress – a psyche on the brink of dissolution – is so deep that it defies and
confounds “containment” by the externalities of formal versification.
The six poems in the opening section of the volume, “Phases of Peril,”
are exceptional in Soyinka’s poetry in two respects. In the first place, they
openly and frankly express the poet’s vulnerabilities in a “confessional”
mode very rare in his writings. At the same time, however, these poems
effectively use techniques of ingenious modulation of lyric voice and
barely noticeable but carefully structured ellipsis to deploy a plethora of
images, metaphors and symbols that sculpt the incommensurable acts
and processes of evil responsible for both the poet’s “perils” and those of
past, present and future victims of oppression and dehumanization. For
instance, “O Roots!,” the first poem in the volume, comprises no less than
thirty-seven almost perfectly sculpted couplets with a scheme of loose, but
generally interrelated rhymes, half-rhymes and assonances. For the first
thirty-one of these couplets, the poem deploys the metaphor of “roots”
as an elaborate poetic conceit seeking to “earth” the poet’s imagination
and spirit in every conceivable landscape of good and evil and of grace
and spite, the suggestion being that these are indeed warring tendencies
in the mind and psyche of the poet in his solitary cell. Moreover, the voice
which takes the poet and the reader through these dialogical locutions
of spirit and psyche is effectively cast in the register of a long, sustained
prayerful apostrophe. One such group of couplets at the beginning of
the poem sets the tone and the logic of metaphoric discourse for the rest
of the poem:
Feet of pilgrims pause by charted pools
Balm seeking. Dipped, their thirsty bowls
Raise bubbles of corruption, sludge
Of evil, graves unlaid to tears to dirge
Roots, I pray you lead away from streams
Of tainted seepage lest I, of these crimes
Partake, from fouled communion earth
In ashes scattered from a common hearth (Shuttle,)The opening image in the fourth stanza of a parched, wandering pilgrim
in some barren landscape who comes upon a “charted pool” which is
expected to provide “balm” for his or her thirst obviously alludes to
phantasmic projections by the fevered mind of the incarcerated poet.
The emotional and spiritual condition of the prisoner-poet is more con-
cretely evoked in the following image in which the “wandering pilgrims”