Wole Soyinka
overturning of the sustaining positive values of faith and grace preached
by all religious creeds:
Vulture presides in tattered surplice
In schism for collection plates, with –
Crow in white collar, legs
Of toothpick death plunged
Deep in a salvaged morsel. Choirmaster
When a hymn is called he conducts,
Baton-breaking their massed discordance
Invocation to the broken Word
On broken voices
Air-tramp, black verger
Descend on dry prayers
To altars of evil
And a charity of victims (Shuttle,)In “Walls of Mists” there is an even more dense and scathing marshaling
of metaphors and tropes of unregenerate evil, precisely because this
is the “wall” from which the poet daily hears prayers and hymns from
female prison inmates. Concerning this wall, Soyinka writes in the section
Preface: “From beyond the Wall of Mists the perverse piety of women,
that inhuman patience to which they were born, drifts across to lash
the anguish from the Wall of Purgatory ().” The “Wall of Purgatory”
alludes to the torture and flagellation wing of the prison; its juxtaposition
with the “Wall of Mists” from which comes the prayers and hymns of the
female inmates needs no comment. But it is also the case that from the
“Wall of Mists” also comes to the poet the shrill laughter and keening cries
of deranged female inmates. Thus, the daily round of prayers (“vespers”)
of the religious sorority becomes for the “encrypted” poet, the “Witches
Sabbath” of the second stanza of the poem, a transmogrification worthy
of the most oneiric metamorphoses in Ovid or Dante:
Witches’ Sabbath what you hold
Vermilion lizards on sun orgies
Monster beetles in wall ulcers, broiled
In steam of mildew drying
Mists of metamorphosis
Men to swine, strength to blows
Grace to lizard prances, honor
To sweetmeats on the tongue of vileness (–)Indeed, Dante is subtly invoked in “Purgatory,” the fourth poem in the
“Bearings” cycle. The allusion of this poem, as we have observed, is to