Poetry and versification: the burden of commitment the prison chamber for the physical and mental torture of prisoners.
In the following lines from the poem, this is envisioned by Soyinka in
the graphic terms of a Dantesque vision of a humanity stripped of all
redeeming values, of even the most ordinary and equable decencies:
For here the mad commingle with the damned.
Epileptics, seers and visionaries
Addicts of unknown addictions, soulmates
To the vegetable soul, and grey
Companions to the ghosts of landmarks
Trudging the lifelong road to a dread
Judicial sentence.
(–)Not all the poems in “Bearings” are driven by this sardonic view of
social life seen from the viewpoint of the most ill-used individuals and
social groups. “Vault Centre,” which brings the topography of “Bearings”
to the very core of the poet’s psychic lacerations in the “crypt,” contains
moving projections of the imagination of the incarcerated poet-artificer
into the soaring flights of the birds he can see from theonlyopen space
directly accessible to him – the bits of skyline visible from slits in the
decrepit ceiling of his cell. It is this same cramped skyline which enables
the poet to get a glimpse of a young boy atop a mango tree reaching out
for the fruit at the topmost branch of the tree. And it is this sight which
elicits from Soyinka in “Amber Wall” perhaps the only completely unam-
biguously optimistic poem in the “Bearings” cycle. There is remarkable
economy and elegance in this poem in its narration of this experience of
contact by the confined poet with another human being in the very act
of garnering the beneficence of nature:
His hands upon the loftiest branches
Halted on the prize, eyes in wonderlust
Questioned this mystery of man’s isolation
Fantasies richer than burning mangoes
Flickered through his royal mind, an open
Noon above the door that closed
I would you may discover, mid-morning
To the man’s estate, with lesser pain
The wall of gain within the outer loss
Your flutes at evening, your seed-awakening
Dances fill the night with growth; I hear
The sun’s sad chorus to your starlit songs ()