The four poems which Okigbo called Canzones and published in the journal Black Orpheus, No. 11, outline his earliest creative itinerary between 1957 and 1961. Considered as representative of the poet's juvenilia, two interesting observations can be made about Four Canzones. Firstly, these poems clearly indicate Okigbo's major physical displacements, all within the old Federation of Nigeria, since graduating from Ibadan University in 1956. Secondly, each of these physical displacements in time and space marks a new stage in Okigbo's poetic development and influence. (p. 24)

The central theme in Okigbo's Four Canzones is nostalgia. This is the result of successive impacts on a highly sensitive mind—hence the dual introspective and retrospective nature of these early poems. Okigbo's feeling of nostalgia is for the innocence of his childhood and for the peace and security of his birthplace. From both of these each successive growth or travel appears to him as a new physical as well as psychic displacement, in fact, a distancing into a form of alienation.

'Song of the Forest', the 1st Canzone, introduces into this central theme that of the prodigal or the exile, Okigbo's favourite protagonist. The poem itself is a bucolic résumé of an intensely introspective life…. Here the poet praises the pastoral ease and the security of village life in preference to the more complicated life in a modern city. Thus the poet insinuates (and here Okigbo is strongly partisan to the negritude tradition which he often criticizes) that the sole course open to the uprooted exile or prodigal is a return in humility and penitence to the original source of his being…. 'Debtors' Lane', the 2nd Canzone, was written in 1959 at Fiditi…. As a rural hideout apparently responding well to the poet's nostalgia, Fiditi was conducive to quiet creative reflections…. Within such a setting the first sub-theme in 'Debtors' Lane' emerges; the rejection of Lagos, its 'high societies' and 'mad generation', its sophisticated pleasures, its night clubs and cabarets…. The second sub-theme is that of personal renunciation of what the poet calls 'heavenly transports … of youthful passion' and the endless succession 'of tempers and moods' This act of ascetic self-denial traces a ritualistic course throughout Okigbo's poetry and is invariably associated with cleansing and purification as a prelude to a new and creative life…. (pp. 25-7)

But 'rejection' and 'renunciation' simply are, within the present pale, themes within a still larger thematic structure: Okigbo's moralistic concern with the individual and the society…. His handling so early of the motif of individuals to whom 'repose is a dream unreal'—either because they are definite failures in life or just misfits in the urban context of it—clearly demonstrates Okigbo's didactic moral purpose as well as his awakening awareness of the consequences of social change in Nigeria. Thus the same themes which inform the city-based novels of Achebe, Ekwensi and Soyinka, the rise of individualism and moral liberalism with a concommitant increased range of preferential alternatives and a relaxation of traditional ties, are equally though implicitly present in Okigbo's poetry. (p. 27)

I have insisted rather heavily upon the social and moral thematic variations in the 2nd Canzone in order to emphasize the early encroachment of T. S. Eliot as a major poetic influence on Okigbo and to suggest that the two years spent at Fiditi mark a turning point in Okigbo's poetic career and thinking. From now on he is going to take poetry seriously as an art of creative self-expression embodying a personal vision of social reality.

The 3rd and 4th Canzones are forms of lament. The third, 'Lament of the Flutes', was written in 1960. The occasion was Okigbo's revisit to his birthplace, Ojoto, a little village near Onitsha in Eastern Nigeria. Brief though it was, this visit contained just the experience necessary to create a feeling of reconciliation in the poet…. [Reconciliation] (here, synonymous with initiation) is to be effected through a process of purification rites…. [This] is a concentric motif in Okigbo's poetry. (pp. 27-9)

Love, particularly a child's first love with its secret pains and its transience, is the last of Okigbo's variations on the theme of nostalgia in his Four Canzones. This theme is introduced into the 4th Canzone, entitled 'Lament of the Lavender Mist', where it is rescued from the usual banalities and romanticisms that surround poetic treatments of the Venus and Adonis motif by Okigbo's reticence and style of griot incantation. (pp. 29-30)

There are three levels to Okigbo's choice of images and symbols in Four Canzones…. There is, first of all, the traditional level, most noticeable in the 1st and 2nd Canzones which are strongly under the romantic and pastoral influence of the Roman poet, Virgil, or by logical extension the larger influence of the Greek poet, Theocritus of Syracuse, whose work in the same pastoral genre cannot have been unfamiliar to Okigbo. Then there is the modern level where Okigbo is concerned with modern actualities ('Debtors' Lane') and also seeks to integrate elements from his readings in modern and contemporary poetry. Finally comes the private level where a deep subjective layer of experience ('Lament of the Lavender Mist') compels the poet to use new forms of synthesis or association of ideas in order to arrive at a verbal approximation of his feeling. (pp. 32-3)

The formal unity of Okigbo's Four Canzones derives from the fact that they are originally intended (or seemingly intended) to constitute a kind of syncretic musical pattern. Okigbo's bold ambition is latent in the chosen title—'Canzones'. He means to go back to the ancient Italian and, surely, the pre-Petrarchan habit of arranging lyrical bits in a group of stanzas so that the verses and the rhymes are disposed in a specially predetermined and uniform order throughout. The result is that usually each 'canzonette' becomes a little Provençal song filled with popular refrains, with sentiment and gaiety. (p. 34)

After this rather synoptic survey, two tentative conclusions may be drawn vis-à-vis the nature of Okigbo's creative itinerary between 1957 and 1961 as represented in his Four Canzones. First is that at the beginning of his poetic career, Okigbo was not unaware of—in fact, was haunted by—a certain 'devil' that required to be exorcised, or at least propitiated. This may be easily dismissed as one of the perennial concerns of poets—just one of those emotions often recollected in tranquility. But the truth is, that the 'devil' can sometimes assume flesh and blood and, as in the 4th Canzone, become the secret 'Lady of the Lavender Mist'. It seems more probable in fact that the 'devil' is Okigbo's sensuality, and the 'lady' is allied to his 'watermaid' and 'lioness' (Heavensgate), the bearer of the mystical vision he is always striving to recapture…. (p. 36)

The second is that Okigbo's poetic language at the same period is both unoriginal and diffident, vacillating between different, often conflicting traditions, and adapting whichever poetic forms and diction may have appealed to his curious and impressionable mind. It is evidence of Okigbo's genius and labour that he practically overcame in his later poetry most of these difficulties and succeeded in creating a poetic technique and an idiom purely his own. (pp. 36-7)

Heavensgate is one long sustained poem, not several poems. It has no one defensible theme in the sense of a 'basic idea', but it is throughout informed by a dynamic ritualistic rhythm which indicates at least two possible levels of analogical interpretation. At one level the poem may be seen as a ritualistic exploration of the process of creative intuition; at another as a mythical projection of a personal experience of the poet. But these two streams are constantly infusing and diffusing into each other because myth is essentially correlative to ritual: myth is the spoken part of ritual, the story which the ritual enacts. (p. 41)

The progression from 'Passage' to 'Initiations', and to 'Watermaid', 'Lustra' and finally to 'Newcomer'—all areas of experience into which the poet-hero in Heavensgate moves—is itself, like the stations of the cross during the Easter season, sufficiently indicative of the ritualistic pattern of the poem. (pp. 41-2)

Okigbo's whole poetic output tends to fit into the Malinowskian definition of myth as 'a narrative resurrection of a primeval reality, told in satisfaction of deep religious wants, moral cravings, social submissions, assertions, even practical requirements', yet it would be wrong to assert categorically that Okigbo sets out to construct a myth. Okigbo's poetry is a poetry of strong tensions and conflicts. It is not a conscious myth-making. In Limits this tension between creative intuition and personal experience, certainly too between myth and ritual, is tightened up, and that in a way compelling one to seek its possible resolution only in terms of religious and spiritual conflict. In fact, Okigbo's poetic attitude on the whole reveals a crisis between a messianic and an apocalyptic conscience: that is, its emotional pendulum swings unsteadily between an expression of hope and a negation of it. Sometimes it moves spiritually round a belief in the restoration of a peaceful social and moral order, a new epoch; sometimes it affirms a disintegration of all existing social and moral codes in favour of a new and more sublime creative reality. (pp. 63-4)

As a general statement on the theme of Okigbo's second volume of poetry, it may be said, provisionally, that Limits, despite its two parts (the 'Siren Limits' and 'Fragments out of the Deluge'), is a poem of ten movements…. The central tension of 'Fragments' is, in plain prose, the burning down of a pagan shrine, either imaginary or real, by the agents of Christian missionaries. In the poetic sensibility this act acquires a new figurative colour and idiom. It becomes the raping of the god and goddess of Irkalla by a warrior 'fleet of eagles' and the killing of the Sunbird which had forewarned their approach. By a prophetic intuition the poet sees the reappearance of the killed god 'outside at the window' followed by the resurrection of the Sunbird whose song he now hears 'from the Limits of the dream'.

'Siren Limits' is, on the contrary, concerned with a problem at the same time more universal and more particular. Universal, because in this part Okigbo discusses the problem common to young poets—that of articulation, the union of soul and voice, the expression of the essential one-self. In other words, he examines the pre-creative psychology or predicament of a poet. But it is also particular, because as a 'Siren' it acts as a particular poem in relation to a particular poet-hero within his particular set of involvements. Thus throughout 'Siren Limits' the impression is that the poet-initiate is taking stock of his conscience, rigorously examining his state of mind before he finally and devoutly goes to the confessional box. Indeed our hero is enacting a prelude to his homecoming. (pp. 64-5)

[The] note on which Limits begins is characterized decidedly by a new structural strength such as is lacking in its predecessor Heavensgate. This strength is revealed mostly in the tone or the voice that speaks in the poem. It is a tone which far from being reflective or sentimental … is neither conciliatory nor compromising. It is virile, almost sure of itself. This tonal strength which marks, we believe, a fresh advance in Okigbo's poetic technique, marks also the beginning of a clearer expression of his more genuine faith, an increasing commitment to a prophetic point of view—thus a new breadth of poetic intuition.

With Limits II we move into an area of ritual cleansing which is expressed symbolically and significantly in terms of vital reconciliation with the essence of light. The idea is worked out on two image patterns; say, for instance, the botanical image or the principle of plants' phototropism, and also the Neoplatonic image of the soul. (p. 67)

Okigbo's commentary has the quality of an insidious art. As in every good work of art, including poetry, certain categories of plastic and fine art and music (particularly classic symphony and modern jazz), such commentaries can only be insinuated through tonal variations, images and rhythmical curves. These demand of the reader, spectator or audience a certain amount of healthy awareness and imaginative participation. Especially in poetry like Okigbo's, which is poor in visual symbols but built up almost exclusively on a jazz-like infra-structure of sound, what is expected of the reader is a painstaking disposition coupled with a good ear. (p. 71)

Okigbo may safely be called an artist who, like James Joyce, prefers not to be committed to a fixed position within his own works. Okigbo's position is generally nowhere fixed in his poetry: at one time he is in the centre of it, at another on the fringe; sometimes he may simply be jesting or complaining, at others just silent or paring his fingernails. This will make rather difficult, or quite nonsensical as biographical criticism, an attempt to pin the poet down to any particular point in his poetry. (pp. 72-3)

But just as Eliot was before him, Okigbo seems to be concerned with the more immediate problem of the poet and his personality in relation to his work and art. In other words, Okigbo is concerned with the artist's ego and with the nature of the experiences in which this is generally manifested…. [For] the poet of Ash-Wednesday and The Waste Land, as for the author of Limits and Distances, the acceptance of an intense personal experience lived in a pattern of symbolic death and rebirth is the central truth of both religious and creative intuition. This is the central ritualistic experience or message which informs Okigbo's poetic world, and one which he comments upon in Limits II.

In that world, Eliot was Okigbo's favourite guide, as Dante had been Eliot's, as Virgil had been Dante's, as Homer had been Virgil's, and so on, since there are no frontiers to the continuity of human thought and artistic aspiration. Okigbo's is a world of dynamic relations and tensions. It is peopled, like Prospero's island, by strange echoes, solitudes, birds, beasts and silences—these for the poet may be various realities or aspects of one ideal mythical or symbolic reality. It is above all a world with two ends. At one end is the 'forest', meaning darkness, ignorance or the creative 'cloud of unknowing'; this is the world of debauched messianism. At the other is the 'sunlight', meaning knowledge, experience and 'the limits of the dream'; this is the world of triumphant apocalypse. In between these two ends there is a continuum, a 'passageway' only to be found through the ritual of purification and by the power of music, art and memory. For Okigbo the true artist or poet is one who is caught up in this primordial continuum. (pp. 77-8)

A sense of religious piety and the principle of ritual death and rebirth constitute the dynamics of the second part of Limits—'Fragments Out of the Deluge'. Underlying this is the poet's feeling of a personal tragedy. Besides a common sense of mythology and a certain prophetic range of imagery there is hardly any continuity between the first and the second parts of Limits and they should best be treated as two separate poems…. 'Siren Limits' is essent ally expository in character whereas 'Fragments' is narrative and dramatic. The first is exploratory of the process of artistic expression—hence the symbolic role of the 'weaverbird'; the second is a prophetic discovery of the fountain-head of creative intuition, hence the use of the 'Sun-bird' as a symbol. If the former introduces a thesis on the process of art and creativity which has to be worked out and somehow concluded …, the latter simply posits a tragic axiom, in fact a universal status quo. (p. 85)

By its theme and craft Path of Thunder differs from [Okigbo's earlier poetry]…. This is so because in it Okigbo makes, for the first time ever, a forthright and direct political statement which itself undisguisedly defines the poet's own revolutionary option. But genetically speaking, Path of Thunder cannot be separated from the earlier poetry written by Okigbo, since it directly springs from the same parent stock or source of inspiration. (p. 174)

[In] Okigbo's poetic sensibility there seemed to exist a genetic struggle between a romantic pursuit of art for its own sake and a constantly intrusive awareness of the social relevance of art—its function, that is, as a means of embodying significant social comments….

[It is possible] that Okigbo in 1962 was afraid of the possible consequences of committing to his poetry statements that would have direct political connotations in the Nigerian scene. This may mean also that he had not at that time fully resolved within himself the problem of whether art should be separated from politics or a poet be free from ideological commitments. (p. 175)

It is precisely at this juncture that Path of Thunder comes in, not as the beginning of a prophecy but as the end of one. In parts, therefore, it is the celebration of the end of a long period of socio-political attente and indecision, both on an individual and a national level, with all the hopes of renaissance and peace which this may imply. In this Path of Thunder does no more than reflect the contemporary mood of the Nigerian public…. Okigbo was one of the disenchanted but helpless 'John Citizens' but, unlike many, his own jubilation and hossanah cry, even as early as that time when it appeared a decisive turning-point had been made, was punctuated with sharp, sober warnings, reflective and suspicious. (p. 176)

Path of Thunder reflects the poet's own feeling of uncertainty about the political future of the country, a feeling which … amounts almost to a criticism of the new direction of events in Nigeria up to May 1966, when the poem itself was written. Nowhere is Okigbo's feeling of resentment more positively expressed than in the last of the poems written in May 1966, 'Elegy for Alto'. In this 'Elegy' the poet's repeated insistence on 'robbers', 'eagles' and 'politicians' (his hatred for these symbols of imperialism goes as far back as the poems of Heavensgate and 'Fragments out of the Deluge') amounts to an unequivocal suspicion as well as fear of a return of events to the status quo ante, with all the implications that this might contain…. (pp. 176-77)

Path of Thunder is, by its very theme and time of composition, a description of the general euphoria which marked the public mood between January and May 1966, after the first military coup in Nigeria. But it is also a poem of a characteristically individual and mature reflection, written by a man who had just turned thirty-three and who was filled more and more with the desire for commitment through positive action as an antidote to the boring insulation and anonymity through fear which art had hitherto provided him…. The discarding of the cloak of impersonality, with its corresponding desire for positive commitment, is even more clearly revealed by the poet's deliberate self-insertion (the possibility of sheer conceit and self-immolation on the poet's part cannot be ruled out) into two of the poems in Path of Thunder…. (p. 177)

Christopher's revolt was an essentially artistic one, expressed by means of his poetry. Prophetic, menacing, terrorist, violent, protesting—his poetry was all these and at the same time it was humane, modest and often sentimental. But in a society such as Okigbo lived and wrote in, where the few leaders, including ministers of culture, could hardly afford the cheap luxury of reading the works of their writers, Christopher's scarring message was naturally and safely insulated, by its shrewd and learned obscurity, from comprehension and possible censorship.

The problem of identity thus emerges effectively as one of the dominant themes in Okigbo's poetry. We have seen this variously treated—with the poet's own awareness of the intrusive world outside—in Heavensgate, Limits and Distances, in the form of man's perennial quest for self-discovery, both on the artistic and the psychic levels. Hence we can conclude that in these poems there exists a deep-seated consciousness of certain shifts in the personality structure of the main characters (who may not necessarily be the poet himself), with the corresponding desire for fulfilment and integration. This may also account for the generally archetypal pattern in Okigbo's poetry, shown in his preference for exiles, for the uprooted or the prodigal as protagonists, and also his use of myth and ritual to illustrate his ideal form of artistic experience. Thus a principle of creative intuition in art and poetry, by no means entirely original, is proposed for us and defined throughout Okigbo's poetry in terms of the individual artist's reconciliation of his first and second 'selves'. This refers to the capacity of every poet to rise above the inner contradictions of his personality and the existentialist angst imposed by his spiritual and physical worlds, in order to give forth an expression compatible with 'organic voice', the imprint, that is, of his own selfhood. The enactment of such a quest follows the well-known pattern of purification and initiation. It also outlines the course of true catharsis. (pp. 181-82)

The dilemma of Christopher Okigbo is that he never truly experienced this normal purgation of art. Every new artistic experience left, on the palate of his intuition, nothing but the sour taste of something raw and unfinished, a question mark and, therefore, a burning desire to start afresh. In other words, his poetic world is informed by a sense of the inscrutable absence of reconciliation of opposites. It is this that has shaped the puzzled syntax of his creative rhetoric. (p. 182)

Sunday O. Anozie, in his Christopher Okigbo: Creative Rhetoric (© Sunday O. Anozie 1972), Evans Brothers Limited, 1972, 203 p.