Wole Soyinka
of couplets. The series of metaphors and images which substitute for
“roots” in the eighteenth and nineteenth couplets – “breakers of dams,”
“battering-rams” made of “granite caps” and “ringer of chimes” –
become more and more grandiose such that by the twentieth couplet
they are merged with “Time’s chaplets” making them coincident with
eternity itself (“stress to your eternal seasons”). Soyinka’s gloss, in the
Preface toA Shuttle, on the master trope of “shuttle” helps provide an
imaginative context for such radical juxtapositions in this and other po-
ems in the volume:
“The shuttle is a unique species of the caged animal, a restless bolt of energy, a
trapped weaver-bird yet charged in repose with unspoken forms and designs. In
motion or at rest it is a secretive seed, shrine, kernel, phallus and well of creative
mysteries.” (vii)
With the possible exception of “Conversation at night with a cock-
roach” which immediately follows it, “Roots” comes closest in the entire
volume to a full poetic mobilization of all the suggestive associations and
resonances of this master trope of the “shuttle.” But even so, the flight
into unanchored transcendent projections that we see in the sixteenth to
twentieth couplets are infrequent in the poem. And it ought to be noted
that the very strict metrical ordering of the poem imposes external con-
straints that have a redounding effect on the internal economy of the
poem’s metaphorical armature. Indeed the last six couplets of the poem
function somewhat like an antistrophe to the preceding thirty-one cou-
plets which thus form the “strophe,” the main line of poetic discourse.
To the peripatetic and grandiose movement of that “strophe,” the sub-
dued “recessional” tone of the last six couplets shows the poet despairing
that he may not physically and spiritually survive the conditions of his
incarceration and, stopping just short of a fatal death-wish, tries to come
to terms gracefully with that possibility:
...The prow
Is pointed to a pull of undertows
A grey plunge in pools of silence, peace
Of bygone voyagers, to the close transforming pass.
Cleansed, they await, the seeker come
To a drought of centers, to slipholds on the climb
And heart may yield to strange upwelling thrusts
Promising from far to slake immortal thirsts ()