Poetry and versification: the burden of commitment It is from this preface, for instance, that we get a sense of the ex-
treme desolation of the psychobiographical condition behind the arrest-
ing oxymoron in the section title contained in the conjoining of the word
“chimes” with its semantic inversion, “silence.” Apparently in order to
increase the psychological ennui of Soyinka’s solitary confinement, his
jailers at a certain stage in his imprisonment virtually sealed off all the
holes or breaches in the walls of his prison cell, thus literally transform-
ing the cell into the “crypt” of the title of the entire volume,A Shuttle
in the Crypt. This act of attempted psychological strangulation appar-
ently worked in the way that it transformed the “crypt” of the poet’s cell
into a harrowing echo chamber in whichallsounds were magnified a
thousand fold. (“When it thunders, my skull is the anvil of the gods”) As
Soyinka remarks in that same preface: “Sounds. Sounds acquire a fourth
dimension in a living crypt. A definition which, as in the case of thunder,
becomes physically unbearable. In the case of the awaited but unheard,
psychically punishing ().”
The three most successful poems of the section are “Bearings,” “Pro-
cession,” and “Seed.” They all derive their power from a dialectical
inversion of the psychic negations of life in the “crypt,” accomplished
through the incarcerated poet’s astonishing but highly disciplined acts of
imaginative and verbal extemporization of the unceasing and pervasive
experience of adversity. For instance in “Bearings,” the very act ofnaming
other topographic sites of the prison complex which Soyinka cannot see
but from which sounds of various kinds invade his “crypt” yields the
arresting tropological titles of the five poems in the cycle “Bearings.”
These are “Wailing Wall,” “Wall of Mists,” “Amber Wall,” “Purgatory”
and “Vault Centre.” “Wailing Wall” is so named because the poet once
heard from a wing of the prison complex the sustained wailing of a prison
inmate who was apparently in his death throes, the wailing lasting all day
from dawn to dusk when the man finally died. This particular incident
must have left a lasting emotional impact on Soyinka because he has
alluded to it in powerful, recurrent terms in other works likeThe Man
DiedandFrom Zia with Love. In “Wailing Wall,” the experience of being
an unwilling witness to this long, unrelieved cry of human anguish from
within the echo chamber of his “crypt” draws from the poet a power-
fully parodic juxtaposition of liturgical symbols normatively associated
with hope, faith and grace with images of scavenging birds of prey like
vultures and crows; the effect, given the primary allusion of the poem
to the hapless wailing, dying inmate, is a grimly sardonic vision of the