Poetry, power, prayer

Last week I ended by quoting Melvyn Bragg on the special qualities poetry has as a form of discourse. Let me remind you what he said: “while paintings fade and sculptures crumble, poetry endures in the collective memory. Indeed, when Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote his famous sonnet “Ozymandias”, about a statue to a great king that had crumbled into the desert sands, he was nodding to this.” Now just to remind readers how the poem “Ozymandias” goes, here it is. But before I reproduce and analyse the poem, it’s important to remember that Shelley was a revolutionary (he had to flee highly conservative England, because it was dangerous for him to live there) and that the poem was composed in 1818, not so many years after the French Revolution. Even closer in time to the writing of the poem was Haiti’s War of Independence and, under Toussaint l’Ouverture, the abolition of slavery in that country (and please bear in mind when reading “Ozymandias” that the splendours of ancient Egypt were enabled by slave labour: something we should always bear in mind when gawping at the pyramids). I met a traveller from an antique land Who said: “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone Stand In the desert. Near them on the sand, Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command Tell that its sculptor well those passions read Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things, The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed. And on the pedestal these words appear: “My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!” Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare, The lone and level sands stretch far away. There is so much one can say about this marvellous poem. Look, for example, at the repeated “b” and “l” sounds in the last two lines, which so well evoke the sense of emptiness, of desolation. Or Shelley’s decision to use not the more familiar name of the Pharaoh Ramses II, but the tyrant’s Hittite name, Ozymandias, which is (faintly ridiculously) grandiose. Best of all, the booming boast of Ozymandias—for, as Moses discovered, in ancient Egypt hot air arose not only from the desert but also from the autocrats. And then the way Shelley punctures the tyrant’s bombast with the devastating simplicity of “Nothing beside remains.” Poetry, then, in the service of the struggle against tyranny. I have been reminded of this a lot recently, as I have been reading a great deal of contemporary Nigerian poetry, especially a volume of poetic tributes to the late Pius Adesanmi, who died in last year’s Ethiopian Airlines crash. So many of the poems in that volume echo the way Pius himself used poetry as a weapon aimed at the corruption and injustices of successive Nigerian governments. I have also been reminded of how dangerous it is for African writers to confront the autocrats, re-reading the work of one of Nigeria’s finest poets, Christopher Okigbo. In his “Path of Thunder” he says: If I don’t learn to shut my mouth I’ll soon go to hell, I, Okigbo, town-crier, together with my iron bell. I am sure that Okigbo is not in hell, but he did die young, in Nigeria’s Civil War. Destroyed by a government that should have protected and venerated him. Chris Dunton