In Chinua Achebe's view, the African writer of our time must be accountable to his society…. To Achebe, it is 'simply madness' to think of art as pure and autonomous, happening by itself in an aesthetic void…. Each of Achebe's four novels has had an obvious (but never obtrusive) purpose. Things Fall Apart and Arrow of God both aim to show that the African past 'with all its imperfections—was not one long night of savagery from which the first Europeans, acting on God's behalf, delivered [Africans]'. The public problems of bribery and the osu caste are examined in No Longer at Ease; A Man of the People, his most purposeful novel, was written with the deliberate aim of providing 'a serious warning to the Nigerian people' about corruption in government and the cynicism of the masses…. Written during and shortly after the Nigerian Civil War, the poems [of Beware, Soul-Brother] are centrally concerned with the regeneration of belief after the blight of war…. In 'Beware, Soul-Brother' and implicitly throughout the collection he identifies the enemies of the public spirit and admonishes his readers to beware. And in the more personal poems of the collection, which dramatize the rebirth in the poet himself of hope for love, new life, and order, Achebe creates a representative spokesman, an exemplary persona whose experience realizes the goal Achebe seeks for his society as a whole, 'the regeneration of its deepest aspirations'. (pp. 1-2)

Achebe's recovery of spirit is sustained more through dessicating irony and indignation than a positive faith, and in the sequential ordering of the poems, is achieved only after an ordeal of horror, disgust, and cynicism.

The poems are arranged so as to suggest a chronological unfolding of perceptions, beginning with 'The First Shot' of the revolution…. The poem sharply contrasts the human time of historical 'first shots' with the mechanical time of real bullets…. Achebe foresees the moment when it will lodge 'more firmly than the greater noises ahead' (real bullets) 'in the forehead of memory', where of course, it will resume the pace of human 'striding' in the 'nervous suburb' of the mind. The contrast of historical and mechanical forces announces a central concern of these poems, exploring the kinship of things human and inhuman.

'Air Raid' further defines the contrasting modes of time seen in 'The First Shot'. 'A man crossing the road / to greet a friend / is much too slow'. 'His friend [is] cut in halves' by the 'bird of death' from the 'evil forest' of technology. The poem's juxtapositions are immediately and simply effective: the potential unity of two men coming together, crossing the road that separates all men, is set off against abrupt, literal division as the friend is cut in half; the flying shadow from technology's evil forest eclipses the full light of noon; human slowness is contrasted with the dreadful quickness of mechanism. (p. 2)

'Refugee Mother and Child' and 'Christmas in Biafra' are longer, more ambitious poems that attempt to evoke pathos through direct description of civilian casualties—mothers and starving children…. Although 'Refugee Mother and Child' and 'Christmas in Biafra' are perhaps the least successful poems in the collection, they are nonetheless important to its central themes…. Seen against the plaster immortality of the rosy-cheeked Jesus, the perishing child becomes 'a miracle of its own kind': his mortality emphasizes the vital humanity of his mother's devotion. The spectacle arouses in Achebe a 'pure transcendental hate'. 'Pure' and 'transcendental' are more than casual intensifiers; they suggest a loftiness of feeling from which any hint of self-blame is absent. As in 'Air Raid', evil is perceived as external; the poet sees that war cuts men in half and starves babies, but he believes in the purity of the man's friendship and the mother's love. In the poems that follow, his confidence steadily wanes.

In 'Mango Seedling' … similar themes appear, but in a different and more effective mask. The poem is loosely allegorical. A mango seedling sprouts incongruously on the concrete ledge of a modern office building. A suggestive emblem of vital, human birth, 'purple, two-leafed, standing on its burst black yolk', the seedling is doomed because it cannot put down roots. Like the starving babies, perhaps the revolution, or even the persona himself, it feeds on its own substance, ultimately starves, and dies…. For the first time in Beware, Soul-Brother the persona stands inside the world of the poem. He, too, is entombed in the sarcophagus, remote from the nourishing earth, his tone as detached and distant as his vantage point two stories above, where he observes the seedling through a glass pane. In this sterile place and age, he can believe none of the myths of fertility…. But in the concluding line, the last two words, 'passionate courage', suddenly break the emotional distance the persona has maintained so far. A 'tiny debris' is all that remains of the seedling's 'passionate courage', but the poet's commitment to the significance of perishing courage is unequivocal. Like the dying babies, the withered seedling represents a last vestige of rapidly diminishing human values.

Achebe's confidence in such redeeming human values disappears completely in the next two poems. 'Vultures' and 'Lazarus' reveal the nadir of the poet's spirits. Both explore the idea that good and evil are inextricably linked; the very germ from which new growth may come is tainted with evil…. As in 'Mango Seedling', the moment of birth is blighted, but now the blighting force can no longer be dismissed as external.

The poet's recovery from this spiritually arid, cynical cast of mind is seen in 'Love Song' and 'Answer'. The transition is marked by two significant changes in the persona's stance: unlike the earlier poems, which relate to public scenes and historical moments of the recent past, 'Love Song' is personal in tone, addressed to 'my love' rather than 'my people', and looks to the future. (pp. 3-5)

The moment of recovery looked forward to in 'Love Song' takes place in 'Answer', which dramatizes 'a dramatic descent', the rooting of a new conception of the persona's self in the 'trysting floor' of the earth…. The metaphor of his re-emergence into 'proud vibrant life' is that of the seedling, bursting out of the darkness of its confining hull and sending the 'twin cotyledons' of his hands upward, his feet as roots drawn downward to the earth. (p. 5)

The implications of the symbolic action in 'Love Song' and 'Answer' are elaborated more discursively in the title poem of the collection. 'Beware, Soul-Brother' shapes the personal experience of these poems into a warning to writers, the 'men of soul'. In the central metaphor of the poem, writers are dancers; the earth of the dancing ground is their inspiration and their responsibility. (pp. 5-6)

'Beware, Soul-Brother' may seem too confident in its laying down the law for the arts, but it can easily be seen that Achebe has himself experienced the sense of disinheritance he warns against. He numbers himself among the soul-brothers, and in 'Answer' reveals a moment when he felt obliged to try to recover a lost vitality. Other poems in the collection also betray the uneasiness of one who cannot simply draw away from the 'departed dance' of the African past, even though he has committed himself to catching up to 'the dance of the future'. In three poems, 'Penalty of Godhead', 'Lament of the Sacred Python', and 'Dereliction' Achebe looks back to the world of his ancestors, not to worship at their shrines, or even to lament their passing, but only to express the pain he feels in abandoning them. The inevitable penalty of Godhead is to be left behind. (p. 6)

But the uneasy sense of having betrayed the past is balanced in the final poems of Beware, Soul-Brother by a healthy scorn for the uncommitted, whose prudence and insensitivity shield them from the ambivalent emotions of engagement. The restored Achebe asserts his judgments to bring his collection to an angry close. In contrast to the 'pure transcendental hate' of 'Christmas in Biafra', the emotion of these concluding poems is 'seminal rage', a committed hatred that fertilizes and sustains his regenerated spirit. 'NON-commitment' and 'We Laughed at Him', the most important of these poems, are built on contrasting images of defence and penetration…. [The eye] is the primary metaphor of these poems. The uncommitted do nothing and feel nothing chiefly because their imagination is timorous and they find sight excruciatingly painful…. The final poem of Beware, Soul-Brother ['We Laughed at Him'], is, of course, a defence of poetry and the poet's role in a society blinded by conventionality and contemptuous of the arts. (pp. 7-8)