"The Lament of the Masks", one of Okigbo's last poems, was written in commemoration of the W. B. Yeats centenary….

It was appropriate that Okigbo should write a poem to celebrate Yeats and his influence on other poets since contemporary African writers coming up then had been much influenced by the tradition of modern verse represented by Hopkins and Yeats, Eliot and Pound. Interestingly though, Okigbo does not use a modern English style in this poem; rather, he sings Yeats in the style of the traditional Yoruba praise song in which the attributes of a hero, ancestor or aristocrat are hailed in animal imagery and analogy from nature…. Section III of the Lament combines the direct address and the naming of the deeds of the hero, typical of the praise song with the use of special symbolism, "the white elephant". Such use of special symbolism occurs in the Yoruba praise song, where in contrast to Okigbo's use, the meaning of the symbol was known by all members (at least by the elders) in the community…. In Okigbo's "Lament", the white elephant symbol serves a more Western poetic function because individual interpretation is permissible, even necessary. Yeats' white elephant could be many things: his poetic activity; his mystical ends expressed in his later poetry; even the cause of the Irish.

However, "The Lament of the Masks" is not in the style of poetry associated with Okigbo's name. It represents a new direction in his poetic style for after this poem he was to speak more and more in an African voice. In fact, by the time he writes his last poems, agonised outcries prophesying war, he had dropped all affectations and was using a poetic rendering of his own conversational voice combined with the style of traditional verse. With Okigbo's name comes to mind, a very personal poetry written in so recondite an idiom that it has given rise to critical debate as to its value; its effectiveness and even its nonsensical nature; and as to whether a reader is not a profane intruder into such hallowed and subjective verse. (p. 2)

Okigbo's earliest poems … are entitled Four Canzones, and they show the influence of his classical education. The first canzone "Song of the Forest" is modelled on the first verse of Virgil's First Eclogue….

The poet Okigbo is sitting in Lagos gazing mentally back at the country, writing like Virgil for an urban reading public, musing about a modern Nigerian problem of alienation from the rural life. Okigbo has the good taste though, not to affect the pastoral device of the imitation of the action of actual shepherds. Okigbo's short exercise is nothing of the scope of Virgil's Eclogue…. Okigbo does not develop his eclogue; nor does he expatiate on public themes. He brings into the poem rather the personal subjectivity of the poet in the twentieth century; in this way imitating Virgil innovatively; therefore achieving a new approach to the pastoral in material and tone. (p. 3)

In fact, Okigbo's second canzone seems to be a variation of the pastoral device. Instead of two shepherds in a dialogue, there are two characters A and B who in solo and unison poetise about the misery of life, deciding to "rest with wrinkled faces / watching the wall clock strike each hour / in a dry cellar" until they choke and die rather "than face the blasts and buffets" of "the mad generation" presumably in the cities. Despite the imitation of Virgilian pastoral poetry and the echoes of Pound however, these early canzones also show some African traits. Firstly, three of them are written to be read or sung to musical instruments after the style of Senghor and in the tradition of the indigenous presentation of African oral poetry. Secondly, like Achebe in his novels, Okigbo reveals a partiality to the "goose pimpling" ogene. Thirdly, the poems voice neo-African themes, such as the contrast between the old and the new after colonialism; the traditional and rural in Africa contrasted with the urbanized and the Westernised; the alienation of the Westernised African; the Hobson's choice he faces between joining "the mad generation" in the filthy Westernised cities or remaining with the alienated and restless poor in the hinterland; the challenge posed by Western intellectual activity to African thought, in particular African religion…. (pp. 3-4)

"The Lament of the Masks" indicates a new development in style from the clear Virgilian statement of the first canzone to the subjective imagery of modern verse…. Despite the literary echoes … such as 'white lilies' and 'roses of blood'; 'woodnymphs' and 'snow-patch', the poem does show new confidence in the use of language … and a newly-expressed concern with the religion of his village in particular the female deity, Idoto, his "Watermaid"; his "lioness with the armpit fragrance," "white queen and goddess" whose worship provide some of Okigbo's most beautiful lyrics with their symbolism and imagic pattern as in Heavensgate. Most significantly, however, in "The Lament of the Masks" there emerges for the first time a poetic persona who is put to more than thematic use, who will now and subsequently in mythopoeic form explore the delicate labyrinths of the poet's subjectivity…. This poetic personality will be increasingly dramatised, placed always at the center of Okigbo's envisioned rituals and creative act. So much does Okigbo identify with this poetic self that in the last poems prophesying war, in particular in the poems, "Hurrah for Thunder" and "Elegy for Slit-drum", the artistic self is inadequately subsumed into vision and experience. The face breaks through the mask.

The fourth canzone "The Lament of the Lavender Mist" carries forward the theme of memory as an important experiential dimension to our poet's imaginative vision. This theme is now more symbolically expressed than previously. In style, the canzone is more broken in rhythm than the earlier pieces. It is evocative of meaning cumulatively through phrase juxtapositions; repetitions and rephrasings; freely collocating images from Christianity and African religion. (p. 4)

Okigbo had attained his distinctive voice and his chosen stance towards the purpose and the doing of his art. From this lament onwards, the act of creation, the writing itself is a rite, transposed in medium…. The poet, as in Soyinka's early poems, is in a self-conscious act of creative ritual. The transposed rite is about experience, limned from memory and recast as ritual, while the poetic self is always at the dramatic center of the creative concentricity.

On one level, "The Lament of the Lavender Mist" can be read as the history of a love relationship; on another as an account of the poet's love for his art and his evolution as poet. It is the mythopoeic form employed in this Lament which is to energise Okigbo in [Silences, Heavensgate and Limits]….

The first part of Silences, subtitled "The Lament of the Silent Sisters" was inspired … by the events of the day which were the Western Nigeria crisis and the death of Patrice Lumumba. This Lament shows the poet borrowing from all and sundry; taking poetic flight from any image which touched his imagination…. Not only does this lament reveal the rewards of predatory and eclectic reading, it indicates yet another new poetic direction,… towards the conscious and experimental use of the resources of the song form such as choruses, refrains, and repetitions; the conveyance of meaning through a contrapuntal use of assonance, dissonance and even pure sound itself. (p. 5)

The second part of "the Silent Sisters" entitled "the Lament of the Drums" is an agitated poem about deprivation and loss; unavoidable pain and mourning expressed through analogues of unanswered praise songs and unconsumated feasts, uncommencable journeys, and unanswered letters; unstemmable tears of wailing populations; and the lament of Ishtar for Tammuz…. Silences foreshadows orgies of violence and carnage on the national landscape. Distances [which follows] is a unified apocalyptic vision of consummation, rendered as a ritual of sacrifice involving the poet, who as victim and votive personage, walks the experiental stations of his cross, beyond "Death, herself … paring her fingernails" to his homecoming to which he is "sole witness".

Okigbo's last poems from "The Lament of the Masks" … to "Path of Thunder" … exploit, more than his earlier writing the attributes of African traditional poetry. Not only are popular proverbs and sayings, epigram and innuendo used, dramatic and situational African images abound such as the ritual of circumcision in "Elegy of the Wind."…

It is easy to see how Okigbo could move from exploiting music in general to using a specific musically expressive form such as African traditional poetry. The poems in Path of Thunder convey the rhythms of African verse in the long line and in the structural penchant for inculcating complete thoughts in single lines, best exemplified by "Come Thunder" and "Elegy for Slitdrum": the latter being perhaps the most African poem of the group in its structure, and presentation; dramatic tensions and language. The imagination behind the poem is decidedly African. Yet these poems cohere in mythopoeic vision with the earlier ones…. The recurrent metaphor of iron, thunder, sentient elements and predatory life are compounded in an African mode to describe the violent political upheaval of the period. The favored elephant symbol reappears as the obdurate Nigerian nation, among other meanings, stumbling towards its doom. (p. 6)

Okigbo's poetry will have to be evaluated in two sets since the published forms of his poems under the title Labyrinths are so dissimilar to their earlier published forms and so re-worked as to be completely new poems. His introduction to the volume sheds light on the artists who have influenced him. No mention however, is made of Senghor, to whom one finds similarities in poetic modes and in formal presentation; situational and verbal—the main difference being the stance of the poet protagonist.

Okigbo is significant because he did what most of the West African writers in English were doing in the 60's—a very personal poetry in a personal idiom—and he brought this mode to a virtuoso point. He represents their initially "art for art's sake" attitude which changed over time. His development therefore traces a West African pattern of artistic evolution from private anguish to public commitment. In addition, Okigbo exemplifies a neo-African wedding of the African to the Western poetic traditions to the rejuvenation of the effeteness and world weariness of the latter. He is, to my mind, one of the finest African poets in English, to be valued for the sheer beauty of his finely honed verse; his most delicate sensibility and the artistic discipline which informs the structure and the lyrical simplicity of his verse, a simplicity which conveys a false impression of facility. (p. 7)