Wole Soyinka
these two figures from Western literature to make ironic, self-deprecating
comments on idealists and visionaries who would set a world out of joint
aright, Hamlet with his will to action paralyzed by endless questioning of
motives and ends, and Gulliver with his outsize intellect and sensibility
held in thrall in a land of spiritual and ethical midgets. The final stanza of
“Gulliver” perhaps best expresses this ironic contemplation of his incar-
ceration that Soyinka makes in this section ofA Shuttleby appropriating
moral and ideological values associated with these archetypal figures
from Western canonical texts. The stanza alludes to the trial of Gulliver
by the Lilliputians in Swift’s classic text. In the light – or darkness –
of the sentence pronounced on Gulliver, his “crime” is generalized be-
yond any personal action or motives to a universal value dreaded by
all tyrants and hegemons – acuity of critical intelligence and moral
insight:
The fault is not in ill-will but in seeing ill
The drab-horse labors best with blinkers
We pardon him to lose his sight to a cure
Of heated needles, that proven cure for all
Abnormalities of view – foresight, insight
Second sight and all solecisms of seeing –
Called vision!
(Shuttle,)All five poems in “Prisonnettes” have about them two mutually self-
cancelling features which justify the ironic diminutive coined from the
word “prison” in the section’s title: on the one hand, a rigid, unvarying
stanzaic pattern in which, without exception, each poem is made up of
five-line stanzas, the fifth line of each stanza being the only line with ten
or eleven syllables, each of the remaining four lines comprising between
two to six syllables; and on the other hand, uniformly sardonic sentiments
and attitudes uncontainable, it seems, by the extreme formalism of the
stanzaic pattern. Thus, while the overall effect of these “prisonnettes”
is not unlike that of the “shotgun” sketches and revues of Soyinka’s
agit-prop drama – roughhewn, hard-hitting and wickedly satiric and
parodic social criticism – the formalism of the metrical pattern acts to
considerably defamiliarize the protest embodied by this group of poems.
This general profile works least in “Anymistic Spells” where obscurity of
allusions make the “cursifying” articulations either opaque or gratuitous;
it works best in a poem like “Background and Friezes” and “Future Plans”
where the objects or events targeted are easily recognizable. In “Anymistic