“Night” is a profound poetic architecture that explores the subject of time. Like the numerous poems on natural events, say love, birth, death, and transition in the general sense – both of African and non-African expressions – “Night” follows that tradition of laying bare a human experience of serious reality. It evokes a natural sense of consciousness about the end of a human adventure. It therefore establishes that there’s a journey essence in man’s existence. Although this suggestion is open-ended, the text is contextual of a certain period of the day with all its attendant episodes. It evaluates preparedness and helplessness. Without equivocation, “Night” is an anxious reflection on the poet-persona’s fate as night encroaches.
By way of summary, in the poem “Night”, the poet-persona is in a monologue, pondering what kind of rest he is to expect. Night is a time of rest from the day’s laborious engagement. However, here is a persona crippled by the thought of the ugly episodes that accompany night. He evaluates his vicarious experience of night’s anomaly and mischief; and perceives at once that he is as vulnerable as any naturally unfortunate creature! He therefore wishes that his own rest comes with a bearable occurrence.
In that breath of description, we can allude at this point to the poet’s cultural background to draw a more vivid and pellucid association of meaning. In his Yoruba folklore, there are maxims that imply that night is a precarious time. Such include “night knows no dignified fellow” and “An evil deed is schemed for the night; whoever dares to launch their stratagem at day will not go unscathed”. These two sayings show that night is designated as a time for wicked operations. And this is what “night children” (stanza 3, line 1) suggests: manifold devilry. By extension, this fact is substantiated by the exposé of Jesus Christ’s about the appearance of tares among wheat – that such evil is done while man sleeps. Extensively still, Yoruba folk belief maintains that man’s existence spans three phases: morning (childhood/youth), afternoon (middle age), and night (old age). In this vein of thought, there is usually the supplication that night comes off as the most pleasant. When we ponder the intercourse of these two paradigms, we obtain a paradox – the very texture of the poem’s rhetoricity.
But poetry usually suggests its meaning. And in this approach, we may obtain an unequivocal meaning by applying the concept of foregrounding. In literature, foregrounding occurs when the everyday meaning of a word is dislocated from it. That is, a common word becomes extraordinary by suggesting a deeper sense relationship that is removed from its ordinary denotation. It is that a common word assumes an unfamiliar meaning which will create a rich and comprehensible evolution of ideas. An example is the common word ‘road’ ultimately creating the mental picture of journey from which we can begin demystifying its use in the context it has appeared. Such is the case with the poem “Night”. We simply cannot presume that the ultimate address of the poet terminates at the episodic mischiefs and devilry of night as a time of the day when it is dark. Rather, we can deduce that, even as the word is personified, the poet is speaking of a phenomenon of human existence. That is, the poem uses the literal idea of night to lyricise the anxiety of ageing!
The first stanza of the poem opens with the poet-persona’s reflection on the inevitability of night as a phenomenal occurrence. It reads as a spontaneous overflow thinking in response to his environment. We can infer that there have been incidents, most probably tragic, around him that pressure him for such meditation on being all too human “to dare/Exacerbation from” night’s “subtle plough” (stanza 1, lines 2-3). The lines suggest simply that no one is charismatic enough to avert a tragedy such as has befallen their neighbour.
In the same breath, the poet-persona, in stanza two, testifies of such manifestations of unsolicited, ugly ends tempered by death and a magnitude of social conditionings from which escape cannot be negotiated. Therefore, the simile “woman as a clam” (stanza 2, line 1) projects an imagery of resignation and fear as the poet witnessed the extinguishing of even “the sea’s/Fluorescence” (stanza 2, lines 2-3). A clam is a mollusc that recoils into its hard crusted shell – for safety. The metaphor of the sea here shows the ruthlessness of a social reality whereby even the most promising of human quota meets a tragic compensation. Put clearly, he has experienced how “night” as an unquestionable authority has terminated the dreams, ambitions, and future of acquaintances far and near. This is substantiated with the use of “crescent” to suggest the dimming of hope. Most probably then, this poem must have been composed under a climate of fear in response to the oppressive and draconian rule of the mid/late 1960’s Nigeria when it was published. Certainly, in that respect, there were several cases of execution, assassination and other dehumanising treatments meted out to those who dared to confront the destabilising, political episodes of that period.
Stanza three is enjambed with the preceding stanza. It effectively and technically continues the flow of thought carried from the illustration presented earlier. But it peaks it with a more reverential consciousness: “And I stood drained/Submitting like the sands, blood and brine/Coursing to the roots” (stanza 3, lines 1-3). This imagery suggests vanity, a prominent awareness associated with the meaning of life, however purposefully it takes shape in the name of ambition, career pursuit, and other privileges true to living a conscious existence. All this is subject to fate. And as the folklorist background of the poet provides, there is always rest to wish for to consummate our accomplishments. But that is a mystery given to happenings beyond human comprehension – resulting from our actions and inactions. But in essence, they result from the catastrophic imposition of forces we cannot placate. The poet-persona continues to corroborate his sense of anxiety with another of night’s visible mischiefs.
The fourth stanza continues on the idea left off in the previous. The poet testifies to night’s severance of unsolicited catastrophe. “Night, you rained//Serrated shadows through dank leaves” (stanza 3, line 3 – stanza 4, line 1). These lines suggest the poet’s proximity with the unbearable events that befell acquaintances whether distant or immediate. Furthermore, night is personified for the effect of exploring details of the sorrow, rejection and atmosphere of melancholy it visits upon an ambitious beginning. Here, “dank” is relevant for one of its implications which means “highly potent”. The paradox here is the intensity of night’s gloom at the prime of life. The severance of this ugliness is carried through to the subsequent lines: “Till, bathed in warm suffusion of your dappled cells/Sensations pained me, faceless, silent night thieves” (stanza 4, lines 2-3). These lines suggest growth and experience. To be engulfed in night’s “dappled cells” is to have survived a share of life’s threatening struggles imposed by the state-of-the-nature forces which are the “silent night thieves”.
Let us recall that a literary text may bear insinuations of a certain social event. In that vein, the many violations of human rights through death penalties and other atrocious power panoply in mid-1960’s Nigeria were consequent of her failed democracy since independence! This reaches its zenith with the bloody civil war which claimed lives in innumerable numbers yet. Before that very drama, serious ethnic rivalry had been the order of the day with ideological conflicts among the champions of independence. Wole Soyinka was privy to the foregoing as a revenant whose literary afflatus spanned the need to overhaul the foundational issues of social, economic, and political security for the vulnerable citizens of Nigeria. In that bid, his interference earned him unjust arrests including his twenty-two-month incarceration during the pogrom. He lost friends, colleagues, and close allies to the trying period. This poem therefore details a recollection of losses and an awareness of his susceptibility.
In the fifth and last stanza, the poet suddenly remembers that a glimmer of possibility hangs about his destiny still. However, even that is strictly hoped for, as he wishes for an end devoid of personal regrets. He hopes for freedom from the ravages of tormentous untimeliness. We can suggest that “night children” (stanza 5, line 1) are the regrets of a wasted youth that stalk the memory upon the event of living longer than one could have imagined possible. At this point, the two ideas of night’s uncertainty intertwine. Even the phrase “night children” is an oxymoron creating a rhetoric of purpose, ambition and the predatory forces under which they operate: no one can ascertain their success as the times afflict. In verse two of the same stanza, “These misted calls” suggest untimely death since we associate mist with the wee hours of the day. In other words, “These misted calls” are the natural and human-induced phenomena snuffing life out of his contemporaries from whom he is no different in human lot. And “Night’s muted birth” suggests that death is an abrupt occurrence against which one can only do oneself the good of having exhausted one’s talent before it calls.
On the whole, “Night” is a working text with both personal and social undertones of life’s ephemerality. It draws inspiration from the Yoruba folk belief about man’s timed existence simultaneously with the social events that determine its value. It tempers the mystery of life with a subject that borders heavily on political unrest, natural occurrences, and unforeseen circumstances to which life is subject.
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