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Partake, from fouled communion earth
In ashes scattered from a common hearth (
Shuttle
,
)
The opening image in the fourth stanza of a parched, wandering pilgrim
in some barren landscape who comes upon a “charted pool” which is
expected to provide “balm” for his or her thirst obviously alludes to
phantasmic projections by the fevered mind of the incarcerated poet.
The emotional and spiritual condition of the prisoner-poet is more con-
cretely evoked in the following image in which the “wandering pilgrims”
Poetry and versification: the burden of commitment
draw foul or poisoned water – imaged here as “bubbles of corruption,
sludge/Of evil, graves unlaid to tears or dirge.” This then leads to the
desperate prayer of the sixth and seventh couplets, a prayer whose tran-
scendent accents have been prepared by the scale of corruption and evil
imaged in the two preceding couplets wherein “graves unlaid to tears
or dirge” distinctly recall the massacre of Igbos in northern Nigeria in
which was a major catalyst in the slide to the country’s civil war in
. It is indeed this careful anchoring of transcendent ruminations and
imaginings in collective and personal experience which makes
A Shuttle
more than a volume of protest poetry. There is in some of the group-
ings of couplets in this particular poem, a tendency to push the scale of
the identification of the poet’s wandering mind with, on the one hand,
elemental regenerative processes of nature, and on the other, the degra-
dation of organic life and processes, to levels of abstraction unsupported
by the immediate, or surrounding, cluster of metaphors and images. But
it is also the case in nearly every instance that the alert critic or reader
who has maintained a sustained grasp of the shifting plethora of images
in the progression of the poem can find echoes, associations and reso-
nances which connect what, on the surface, appears to be floating ab-
stractions. One example of this pattern is the one we encounter in the
sixteenth to the twentieth couplets:
Roots, be the network of my large
Design, hold to your secret charge
All bedrock architecture raised to heal
Desert cries, desert lacerations; seal
In barks of age, test on battering-rams
Of your granite caps O breaker of dams
Pestle in earth mortar, ringer of chimes
In rock funnels, render mine Time’s
Chaplets, and stress to your eternal season
These inward plinths I raise against unreason.
(
Shuttle
,
–
)
Without referring back to the “shuttle” as the master trope of stratagems
and projections which both ensured the poet’s survival from the mind-
destroying threat of solitary confinement for nearly two years and enabled
him to be creatively productive in spite of the prohibitions of his incar-
ceration, it would be impossible to keep track of the connection between
image or symbol and the transcendent values referenced in this sequence
Wole Soyinka
of couplets. The series of metaphors and images which substitute for
“roots” in the eighteenth and nineteenth couplets – “breakers of dams,”
“battering-rams” made of “granite caps” and “ringer of chimes” –
become more and more grandiose such that by the twentieth couplet
they are merged with “Time’s chaplets” making them coincident with
eternity itself (“stress to your eternal seasons”). Soyinka’s gloss, in the
Preface to
A Shuttle
, on the master trope of “shuttle” helps provide an
imaginative context for such radical juxtapositions in this and other po-
ems in the volume:
“The shuttle is a unique species of the caged animal, a restless bolt of energy, a
trapped weaver-bird yet charged in repose with unspoken forms and designs. In
motion or at rest it is a secretive seed, shrine, kernel, phallus and well of creative
mysteries.” (vii)
With the possible exception of “Conversation at night with a cock-
roach” which immediately follows it, “Roots” comes closest in the entire
volume to a full poetic mobilization of all the suggestive associations and
resonances of this master trope of the “shuttle.” But even so, the flight
into unanchored transcendent projections that we see in the sixteenth to
twentieth couplets are infrequent in the poem. And it ought to be noted
that the very strict metrical ordering of the poem imposes external con-
straints that have a redounding effect on the internal economy of the
poem’s metaphorical armature. Indeed the last six couplets of the poem
function somewhat like an antistrophe to the preceding thirty-one cou-
plets which thus form the “strophe,” the main line of poetic discourse.
To the peripatetic and grandiose movement of that “strophe,” the sub-
dued “recessional” tone of the last six couplets shows the poet despairing
that he may not physically and spiritually survive the conditions of his
incarceration and, stopping just short of a fatal death-wish, tries to come
to terms gracefully with that possibility:
. . .
The prow
Is pointed to a pull of undertows
A grey plunge in pools of silence, peace
Of bygone voyagers, to the close transforming pass.
Cleansed, they await, the seeker come
To a drought of centers, to slipholds on the climb
And heart may yield to strange upwelling thrusts
Promising from far to slake immortal thirsts (
)
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