Live Burial

Hello readers:) 

                       This is a response blog on a task given by my teacher. It was related to African literature. In this blog I am given to analyze the thematic studies of Two poems one is You Laughed and Laughed and Laughed by Gabriel Okara and second is Live Burial by Wole Soyinka. 

 Live Burial

Akinwande Oluwole Babatunde  

Nigerian playwright, novelist, poet, and essayist in the English language. He was awarded the 1986 Nobel Prize in Literature, for "in a wide cultural perspective and with poetic overtones fashioning the drama of existence", the first sub-Saharan African to be honoured in that category. Soyinka was born into a Yoruba family in Abeokuta.In 1954, he attended Government College in Ibadan, and subsequently University College Ibadan and the University of Leeds in England. After studying in Nigeria and the UK, he worked with the Royal Court Theatre in London. He went on to write plays that were produced in both countries, in theatres and on radio. He took an active role in Nigeria's political history and its campaign for independence from British colonial rule. In 1965, he seized the Western Nigeria Broadcasting Service studio and broadcast a demand for the cancellation of the Western Nigeria Regional Elections.In 1967, during the Nigerian Civil War, he was arrested by the federal government of General Yakubu Gowon and put in solitary confinement for two years, for volunteering to be a non-government mediating actor.

Wole Soyinka is best known as a playwright. Alongside his literary career, he has also worked as an actor and in theaters in Nigeria and Great Britain. His works also include poetry, novels, and essays. Soyinka writes in English, but his works are rooted in his native Nigeria and the Yoruba culture, with its legends, tales, and traditions. His writing also includes influences from Western traditions—from classical tragedies to modernist drama.

Poem

Sixteen paces

By twenty-three. They hold

Siege against humanity

And Truth

Employing time to drill through to his sanity

Schismatic

Lover of Antigone !

You will? You will unearth

Corpses of yester-

Year? Expose manure of present birth?

Seal him live

In that same necropolis.

May his ghost mistress

Point the classic

Route to Outsiders' Stygian Mysteries.

Bulletin:

He sleeps well, eats

Well. His doctors note

No damage

Our plastic surgeons tend his public image.

Confession

Fiction ? Is truth not essence

Of Art, and fiction Art?

Lest it rust

We kindly borrowed his poetic licence.

Galileo

We hoped he'd prove - age

Or genius may recant - our butchers

Tired of waiting

Ordered; take the scapegoat, drop the sage.

Guara'l The lizard:

Every minute scrapes

A concrete mixer throat.

The cola slime

Flies to blotch the walls in patterned grime

The ghoul:

Flushed from hanging, sniffles

Snuff, to clear his head of

Sins -- the law

Declared -- that morning's gallows load were dead of.

The voyeur:

Times his sly patrol

For the hour upon the throne

I think he thrills

To hear the Muse's constipated groan

Themes

1.Sadism

In the poem it was sadism about torture he was feel in the prison and he was describe the prison cell and how the Government official making fake documents of prison and Guard, voice of rebellion people. 

2.Greek Mythology

In this poem poet use three Greek mythical figures

Antigone

Antigone, in Greek legend, the daughter born of the unwittingly incestuous union of Oedipus and his mother, Jocasta. After her father blinded himself upon discovering that Jocasta was his mother and that, also unwittingly, he had slain his father, Antigone and her sister Ismene served as Oedipus’ guides, following him from Thebes into exile until his death near Athens. Returning to Thebes, they attempted to reconcile their quarreling brothers—Eteocles, who was defending the city and his crown, and Polyneices, who was attacking Thebes. Both brothers, however, were killed, and their uncle Creon became king. After performing an elaborate funeral service for Eteocles, he forbade the removal of the corpse of Polyneices, condemning it to lie unburied, declaring him to have been a traitor. Antigone, moved by love for her brother and convinced of the injustice of the command, buried Polyneices secretly. For that she was ordered by Creon to be executed and was immured in a cave, where she hanged herself. Her beloved, Haemon, son of Creon, committed suicide. According to another version of the story, Creon gave Antigone to Haemon to kill, but he secretly married her and they had a son. When this son went to Thebes to compete in athletic contests, Creon recognized him and put him to death, whereupon his parents committed suicide.

Muse

In ancient Greek religion and mythology, the Muses  are the inspirational goddesses of literature, science, and the arts. They were considered the source of the knowledge embodied in the poetry, lyric songs, and myths that were related orally for centuries in ancient Greek culture.

In Greek mythology, the nine Muses are goddesses of the various arts such as music, dance, and poetry. Blessed with wonderful artistic talents, they also possess great beauty, grace, and allure. Their gifts of song, dance, and joy helped the gods and mankind to forget their troubles and inspired musicians and writers to reach ever greater artistic and intellectual heights.

The Muses are the daughters of Zeus and the Titan Mnemosyne (Memory) after the couple slept together for nine consecutive nights.

Stygian

of or relating to the river Styx

 extremely dark, gloomy, or forbidding(Merriam Webster) 

Stygian comes to us (by way of Latin stygius and Greek stygios) from Styx, the name of the principal river in Hades, the underworld of the dead in Greek mythology. This is the river over which Charon the boatman was said to ferry the spirits of the dead; the Greeks and Romans would place a coin in the mouth or hand of the deceased to serve as fare. It is also the river by which the gods swore their most binding oaths, according to the epics of Homer. English speakers have been using stygian to mean "of or relating to the river Styx" since the early 16th century. From there the meaning broadened to describe things that are as dark, dreary, and menacing as one might imagine Hades and the river Styx to be. 

In the poem he was use greek mythology with great knowledge about that use in second stanza as lover of Antigone and third stanza use of Stygian with necropolice and atmosphere of the prison and third myth he was is about Muse in the last stanza to describe third guard he was use Or connected with constipation. 

3.Imprisonment

the act of putting someone in prison or the condition of being kept in prison:

Poet describe his cell length in the first line of poetry and he was also give some of the hints of Torture in the prison and how he was suffer and others who are in prison. Powerful people try to convince him by force to admit which they want. 

4.Metaphor

In poem poet use metaphor for guard when he was in prison for the first guard lizard and second as ghoul and for the third guard voyeur. All three have different habits and their description in the poem like first one always chewing something and then spit on walls second is hanged prisoners then take drugs to making himself relax or try to forget guilt and third was very disgusting habit like he was patrolling when prisoners on toilet seat