AFRICAN POETRY Examine the poet's use of images in "Songs of Sorrow I and II".

Answer Details

Kofi Awoonor's "Songs of Sorrow (I and II)" is an elegiac lament rooted in Ewe dirge tradition. The poet builds his grief through a sustained sequence of images drawn from nature, the body, death and the traditional world, and these images give the poem its mournful, brooding power.

Images of desolation and isolation

• The speaker declares that "Something has happened to me," and pictures himself standing at the edge of experience: "the fetish house by the road" and the image of being "far away in a bush" convey abandonment and spiritual dislocation.
• The wilderness and barren landscape images externalise inner sorrow, suggesting a man cut off from community and hope.

Images of death and decay

• Death dominates the poem. The land of the dead, the grave and dead kinsmen recur, and the speaker's dead relatives (Kpeti, Kove and the great household) are invoked, showing a family and lineage consumed by loss.
• Water imagery, such as the "vast ocean" that is too wide to cross, symbolises the overwhelming, uncontrollable flood of grief and the barrier of death.

Images of obstruction and helplessness

• The recurring picture of the "snail" without horns and the man whose way is blocked by the log or the great river conveys frustration and paralysis.
• The image of dew, the early bird and the creeping progress of the speaker suggests a life burdened before it can even begin.

Animal and traditional imagery

• The crab, the snail and the vulture ground the lament in an African rural setting and reinforce vulnerability and smallness before fate.
• References to the ancestral gods and the fetish house link personal sorrow to a communal, spiritual world.

Effect of the imagery. These images work cumulatively to dramatise a grief that is both personal and communal. By fusing nature, death and tradition, Awoonor makes the reader feel the weight of a sorrow that seems as vast as the ocean and as inescapable as death itself. The imagery is the very medium through which the elegy achieves its haunting emotional force.