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Poetry and versification: the burden of commitment
Silence,” the volume’s longest and central section. Typical of the fusion
of spare, austere formal technique with high moral purpose in these two
poems are the following two stanzas, each from “I Anoint Myself” and
“Seed” respectively:
I anoint my heart
Within its flame I lay
Spent ashes of your hate –
Let evil die. (
)
I speak in the voice of gentle rain
In whispers of growth
In sleight of light
I speak in aged hairs of wind
Midwife to cloud
And sheaves on threshing-floor (
)
The four “archetypes” of the section which bears that title, Joseph,
Hamlet, Gulliver and Ulysses, are figures from Western canonical re-
ligious and secular texts, respectively the Bible, Shakespeare’s
Hamlet
,
Jonathan Swift’s
Gulliver’s Travels
, and James Joyce’s
Ulysses
. Not surpris-
ingly, these are the most academic, the most bookishly allusive poems
in
A Shuttle
. In fact the whole tenor of “Gulliver,” its diction and style,
distinctly and elaborately echo British Augustan poetry, specifically of
the mock-epic mode. And concerning “Ulysses” Soyinka adds a sig-
nificant explanatory gloss: “Notes from here to my Joyce class (
Shuttle
,
).” The “here” is of course his solitary detention cell, the “Joyce class”
metonymically standing for the reader-addressees of the poem. Thus, the
four poems in this section of
A Shuttle
are constructed with the assumption
that the reader will recognize the allusions to the poem’s textual sources.
In this regard “Joseph” and “Hamlet” make much fewer demands of
“learnedness” on the reader than do “Gulliver” and “Ulysses,” the lat-
ter being especially recondite and forbidding in the manner in which
it appropriates the tropes of the legend of Ulysses to narrate the angst
of an enervated quester, of a voyager who has come to a quiescent but
troubled senescence. If this portrait seems to refer to the poet himself,
it ought to be added that it does so only in the register of a caution-
ary parable: the incarcerated poet hopes that this will not be his fate.
“Hamlet” and “Gulliver” are perhaps the most successful of the
“Archetype” poems in this regard, even though there is in “Gulliver”
a slight touch of what we have identified in this study as the Coriolanus
complex. In these two poems, Soyinka appropriates the central legends of
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 of
A Shuttle
by 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
Poetry and versification: the burden of commitment
Spells,” the target is Yakubu Gowon, head of the civil-war military regime
in power in Lagos during Soyinka’s incarceration; in “Future Plans” the
event (or phenomenon) referred to is the bizarre pattern of international
alliances formed either in support of, or against secession during the
civil war. In general then, the “Prisonnettes” poems show Soyinka using
his tried and tested weapons of protest and resistance – satire, parody,
invective – without the mediation of his complex mythopoesis, but with
a discreet technical formalism which skillfully exploits the confinement
imposed by his detention. The last two stanzas of “Future Plans” are
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