Poetry and versification: the burden of commitment Silence,” the volume’s longest and central section. Typical of the fusion
of spare, austere formal technique with high moral purpose in these two
poems are the following two stanzas, each from “I Anoint Myself” and
“Seed” respectively:
I anoint my heart
Within its flame I lay
Spent ashes of your hate –
Let evil die. ()
I speak in the voice of gentle rain
In whispers of growth
In sleight of light
I speak in aged hairs of wind
Midwife to cloud
And sheaves on threshing-floor ()The four “archetypes” of the section which bears that title, Joseph,
Hamlet, Gulliver and Ulysses, are figures from Western canonical re-
ligious and secular texts, respectively the Bible, Shakespeare’sHamlet,
Jonathan Swift’sGulliver’s Travels, and James Joyce’sUlysses. Not surpris-
ingly, these are the most academic, the most bookishly allusive poems
inA Shuttle. In fact the whole tenor of “Gulliver,” its diction and style,
distinctly and elaborately echo British Augustan poetry, specifically of
the mock-epic mode. And concerning “Ulysses” Soyinka adds a sig-
nificant explanatory gloss: “Notes from here to my Joyce class (Shuttle,
).” The “here” is of course his solitary detention cell, the “Joyce class”
metonymically standing for the reader-addressees of the poem. Thus, the
four poems in this section ofA Shuttleare constructed with the assumption
that the reader will recognize the allusions to the poem’s textual sources.
In this regard “Joseph” and “Hamlet” make much fewer demands of
“learnedness” on the reader than do “Gulliver” and “Ulysses,” the lat-
ter being especially recondite and forbidding in the manner in which
it appropriates the tropes of the legend of Ulysses to narrate the angst
of an enervated quester, of a voyager who has come to a quiescent but
troubled senescence. If this portrait seems to refer to the poet himself,
it ought to be added that it does so only in the register of a caution-
ary parable: the incarcerated poet hopes that this will not be his fate.
“Hamlet” and “Gulliver” are perhaps the most successful of the
“Archetype” poems in this regard, even though there is in “Gulliver”
a slight touch of what we have identified in this study as the Coriolanus
complex. In these two poems, Soyinka appropriates the central legends of