A Comparative Reading of Two Poems

Ernest Ogunyemi's 'Notes on Ambition', and Eniola Abdulroqeeb Arowolo's 'Quest'

I try as much as possible to not subject Ernest Ogunyemi’s Notes on Ambition to textbook-analysis. (Textbook-analysis, I hold, always deprives the reader of the delight of discovery). In this review, however, I try to compare Ogunyemi’s poem, Notes on Ambition, with Eniola Abdulroqeeb Arowolo's poem, Quest, written after Ogunyemi’s poem. In this review, I contrast both poems, examining their ideas, and more specifically whether Arowolo's poem, Quest, qualifies as an after-poem. The review is guided by the presupposition that an after-poem should continue the sequence of thought in the predecessor poem, should begin its own thought from there, or should contribute a thought to the major thought in the predecessor poem. I argue that in the three cases above, Arowolo's Quest has failed.

Notes on Ambition epistles a small, fascinated life. The poem is a short-form prayer. However, it is also beyond that, because its persona does not celebrate his own human frailty. He recognizes—but also decentres— his weakness. His prayer is from a broken place, but is not a judgment on it as a mutable season of human life— a comeuppance, a changing existential inevitable.

On the other hand, the poem ignores the question of when the “bruise” should go, but focuses on the human condition from when “the bruise stay[s] sharp.” This is the first thing that distinguishes the poem, even if only slightly; in that it acknowledges—and sidelines— the anguish of pain for another truth.

Whether this other truth is explored goes beyond the scope of the poem. The poem instead only captures the tension that undergirds the persona’s doggedness as opposed to his smallness and “petty anxieties”, in the pursuit of truism that a bruise engineers.

God as Introduced Material

Notes on Ambition begins with a goal and the God-element as the introduced material.

“To be sculpted…by hunger, to be mended/ True by bruise” is interpretable in two ways, chiefly because of the em dash (—). First, if it has only been the case of thematic fronting/inversion in the sentence—“To be sculpted, Lord, by hunger… astonishment”—then it can be re-arranged thus:

“I have placed my little box

Of fire at the corridor of dusk, my budding

Seraphim at the region of quiet

Astonishment,

[so as] to be sculpted, Lord, by hunger, to be mended

True by bruise…”

A sentential re-ordering like this will subvert—and even limit—the meaning in the original ordered form. The former ordering suggests that the goal of the sub-clause (“to be sculpted… bruise”) is embedded in the action of the alpha clause (“I have… astonishment”), the result of which the very next line (“The world has begun…”) will be discontinued from the foregoing, and will alter its specific and, by extension, its general meaning.

Nevertheless, in its original form (the sub-clause divided by em-dash, then the alpha clause), the line (“To be sculpted, Lord, by hunger, to be mended/ True by bruise”) can be argued as the entire poem’s focus, the poem’s statement and goal, its raison d'être.

Furthermore, God, in poems like this (which I call plea-poems), is often treated as extraneous material. The material is a mere starting point, as a means to an end. It is as though God is invocated to be a passive presence, not to do anything, but to be utilized—as an instrument through which the psychological self is depicted.

In Ogunyemi’s poem, it is different. This material stands as the implied link through which the persona’s self—his resilience in the face of insignificance and pain— can be comprehended. God is a presence capable of action; and an extension of his action contrasts sharply with the persona’s, and explains the latter.

The rigor of Ogunyemi’s language and sequence of images afford only a strict inference of meanings. Consequently, only one line reveals God’s participation in the poem. Other contexts derive from the meaning in that poem.

The line is:

“the pulley’s music cranks/ And cranks.” (Stanza 4).  

“The pulley”, as used in the line, has no explicit referent. I propose that it alludes to George Herbert’s poem, The Pulley; Herbert’s poem depicts restlessness as man’s permanent connection to God. The brilliance of usage in Ogunyemi’s poem is how that restlessness is subordinated in the phrase. By using “the pulley” adjectivally, that is, in a non-centre position, the line instead emphasizes “music” in order to contrast the persona’s own “low and silly” music.

To me, this contrast is the key to understanding the poem’s last stanza, and a model with which one comprehends the propellant for the persona’s resilience.

“Let the bruise stay sharp”,

“Let the mounting hands/Be weak at first light”

“Let my body return/Often”

therefore becomes, in this light, consequent actions upon the foregoing action of “the pulley’s music, [which] cranks,/ And cranks”. The noisiness of cranking, the sound and its repetition, outlines its self-persisting importance in a world that has already begun, a world against which the persona feels diminished.

When one understands “the pulley’s music” as God’s pull in the noise of the persona’s everyday existence; when one understands the persona’s relationship with the Divine as the drive for his bold assertions; that is when one understands the “quest” at the end of the poem, which has already been foreshadowed by the first two lines of the poem.

Arowolo's Quest

Arowolo's poem, an after-poem to Ogunyemi’s Notes on Ambition, is also a short-form prayer. More than that, it is a psalmist note, borne out of existential contemplation. Unlike Notes on Ambition, Quest’s persona is helpless. He comprehends the nature of existence in order to philosophize it, to fashion it into a workable, one-size-fits-all theory. By extension, the persona does not concern himself with an existential position that transcends/de-emphasizes human weakness (as Notes on Ambition has done)—for the persona is incapable even of that. Instead, the poem reiterates a human condition Notes on Ambition has already left behind, and ignores the presuppositions of an after-poem as previously outlined.

As a result, Quest discontinues the poem it ought to follow after. Put differently, Notes on Ambition can be seen as a continuation of Arowolo's Quest—thus sustaining an inverse relationship.

Quest’s goal is dualistic: to philosophize and to pray. Its persona has already accepted his conditional as an existential inevitable, an insuperable variable. It is the persona’s very philosophy, his idea of “the essence of life”. On this point, it diverges markedly on all three scores on ‘Notes on Ambition’’s raison d'être.

Inverse Relationships

Two things distinguish both poems: their goal and starting point, and the participation of the Divine in them. Notes on Ambition’s goal is that its persona transcend his humanness—frailty, anxieties, insignificance, and so on. The poem opens precisely with that goal. Thus, its starting point is a place of brokenness towards a place of boldness at the cusp of transcendence. And to this persona, God is the introduced material, the implicated propellant.

Quest’s goal is dualistic: to philosophize and to pray. Its persona has already accepted his conditional as an existential inevitable, an insuperable variable. It is the persona’s very philosophy, his idea of “the essence of life”. Unlike Notes on Ambition, Quest’s persona only concerns himself superficially with the question of transcendence. Although the persona prays, the prayer is extraneous—he prays rather for the season of “fruition” and “riches”. The combination of this philosophy and prayer further implicates the persona. We know that he is incapable of intuitively grasping the human condition at the center of ruin, and man’s response to that ruin, for the persona’s philosophy only recounts the movement of time and ignores these questions.

Furthermore, Quest’s starting point is a wasteland.

“The soil once vegetated by luscious ferns

Is now riddled with summer heat & dry stumps.”

Then the poem continues, not to examine this condition, but to crystallize it, “the mutable music of seasons”, as the “essence of life.” Then the poem proceeds to make an allegory of this condition, then a simile of it, then a philosophical, and assertive statement of this condition: “Death is as evident as birth.” Then comes the shocking, disconnected prayer. With this underhanded treatment of subject matter, with the poem’s superficiality, Quest has failed to fulfill its promises as an after-poem of Notes on Ambition. Instead, with a persona that grasps his condition only theoretically, the poem becomes a discontinuity to its predecessor.

Another factor that distinguishes Quest from Notes on Ambition, (and makes it a discontinuity), is the participation of the Divine in it. God, or the Divine, is referred to twice in Quest.

In the first instance—“Grace spills/ From its potent cup”— God is important only because it furthers the philosophical proposition that “Mutable music of seasons…[is] the essence of life.” God there has no agency, He is a needless material, a mere means to an end, incapable of affecting the poem’s sequence of thought, let alone pivoting it. In the second instance, God appears in the penultimate line, not actively, but as a passive presence. Another entity is prayed to (it can be any universal abstract, maybe Season, or Time), and not God. The way to understand this divergence is to see Quest as deistic and Notes on Ambition as pantheistic.

These divergences shed new light on each poem’s ending, and announce the different persona’s anxieties and requests.

Notes on Ambition ends with: “Give my longing direction. Stay/ my quest. Let a lighter vessel bear me.”

While Quest ends with: “Lighten the yoke./ Rid my garden of anxieties.” 

The former longs for divine communion. Thus, he does not center the burden of everyday living; and, does not pray about it. This persona is anxious for another existence entirely. Quest, on the other hand, centers the burden of everyday living. This persona is trapped in it, trapped also by his knowledge of their presence. Consequently, they become his anxieties. It follows to reason which mode of existence continues the other: to center the burden of everyday living, to philosophize it, to accept it as an existential inevitable? or to pursue after another existence?