AFRICAN POETRY
Consider the presentation of the theme of poverty in “Myopia”
Explanation
The poem is made up of three uneven stanzas. The end of each stanza develops the theme. The final and longest stanza shows the persona’s resolution as well as his attitude towards those whom society has impoverished.
The poem opens with a statement on the plight of the peasants – miserable, vulnerable and rain-battered. They are not hidden in some countryside obscurity. In the midst of the affluent they suffer their misery. They shiver “in their emaciated bones/along the boulevards of misery”. The oxymoron “boulevards of misery” is a powerifil expression that captures the stark misery of the poor peasants. The image produced by the contrast between the rich and the poor is carried over to the second stanza by the deliberate explication of the boulevards in relation to the vehicle that plies it: “a train of anguish”. In a powerful metaphor, the impractical infrastructure is described as “railway tracks in my heart” on which “a train of anguish runs”. There is the rage of hunger when the rice pads have become unproductive and unresponsive to fertilizer.
In the third stanza the poem confronts the problem of the plight of the poor. He looks for “the incendiary bomb” made from the “skeleton of stillborn promises”. He is fed up with the mad system amidst the unkept promises of the leaders. The neglected rice pads of the country deepen the misery of those who feed the people: the peasants.
The paradox of the hangman hanging himself portrays his determination to get rid of corrupt politicians and sanitize the society once and for all. However, that is not all.
The poet makes the form of the poem fit the nature of his passion. There is economy of lines when he says a lot in a few lines. On the other hand, when he opens up and qualifies what he puts forward, he requires longer stanzas.