Beyond the Verse - Chinua Achebe's 'Love Cycle': Exploring Tensions and Harmonies in Post-Colonial Poetry

Episode Date: December 6, 2024

In this week’s episode of Beyond the Verse, the official podcast of PoemAnalysis.com and Poetry+, hosts Joe and Maiya delve into Chinua Achebe’s 'Love Cycle,' an evocative exploration of Igbo tradition, cosmology, and the dynamics of relationships.The episode opens with a deep dive into Achebe’s life, tracing his journey from a colonized Nigeria to the publication of his renowned novel, "Things Fall Apart," and its influence on global perceptions of Africa. The hosts then analyze how 'Love Cycle' reflects the interplay of Igbo mythology, colonial history, and universal themes of love and conflict. They highlight the portrayal of the sun and moon as metaphors for a toxic, cyclical relationship, touching on gendered archetypes, elemental forces, and Achebe’s masterful blending of cultural traditions.Throughout the discussion, Joe and Maiya uncover the symbolic resonance of Achebe’s work—balancing aggression and affection, permanence and change, and the historical tensions between colonizer and colonized. They also draw comparisons to poets like William Butler Yeats and Emily Dickinson, illustrating Achebe’s global literary connections.Poetry+ users can access exclusive PDFs of Achebe’s 'Love Cycle':Full PDF GuidePDF Snapshot GuideFor more on Chinua Achebe’s poetry and its broader cultural impact, visit PoemAnalysis.com, where you can also explore extensive resources in our PDF Learning Library, browse hundreds of analyzed poems, and much more – see our Chinua Achebe PDF Guide.Tune in and discover:The rich cosmological imagery in Igbo traditionAchebe’s nuanced portrayal of love as cyclical and complexThe intersection of postcolonial themes with personal relationshipsHow Achebe’s intertextuality shapes his unique poetic voiceSend us a textSupport the showAs always, for the ultimate poetry experience, join Poetry+ and explore all things poetry at PoemAnalysis.com.

Welcome to Beyond the Verse, a poetry podcast brought to you by Poemanalysis.com and Poetry Plus. Today we're discussing Chinua Acebe's love cycle. Now we'll be touching on Igbo tradition and storytelling, the importance of cosmology and cyclical relationships within the poem. So, Joe, can you tell us a little bit about Acebe where he was? at this point and a little bit about the poem's background. Yeah, I'd love to. So I know many of our listeners will be aware that Chimori Chabaybe is a favourite writer of both yours and mine, so I'm really excited to be discussing his poem today.

Achebe was born in Nigeria in 1930, in the country that was then under British rule, did not achieve independence until 1960. And that really shaped Achebe's early life, his perception of the world from his vantage point in Nigeria. This poem was published in his collection, Beware, Soul Brother and Other Poems, which came out in 1971.

With Acebe, really, we have to go back 13 years before that to the publication of his novel, Things Fall Apart, which is one of our favorite novels, Meyer, but also one of the most important novels of the 20th century, completely redefined the way in which non-African readers perceives the continent of Africa. So that was 1958. Nigeria achieved independence from Britain in 1960, so two years after the publication of Things Fall Apart, and Achebe was then on this remarkable run of these novels. so he published No Longer at Ease in 1960, Arrow of God in 1964, and a Man of the People in 1966, all of which are works of prose. His reputation by this point was growing around the world. He was hugely respected, both in Nigeria and in Europe and North America as well.

The country underwent a civil war between 1967 and 1970, and then this poem is published in 1971. So this incredibly tumultuous period, both of Nigeria in history, but also of a Chebe's life where he sort of transformed over this decade, and a half from a complete unknown to this global phenomenon, this incredible writer that really the world had never seen anyone like him before, who came from the culture that he came from and was able to capture the essence of life in rural Nigeria in a way than no other writer before, or I would argue since, has been able to quite do. So that's a little bit

about Acebe, where he is at this point, but Meyer, the poem itself. Can you tell us a little bit more about it, describe it in broad strokes, and then where would you like to begin with terms of our deeper analysis. Well, thanks, Joe. So this poem is one of the most beautiful poems I've ever read, I think. It effectively covers the relationship between two people as described through cosmology. When we say cosmology, we mean the motifs of the sun, the moon. So this poem's opening line goes as such.

At dawn slowly, the sun withdraws his long, misty arms of embrace. Now, this first line is absolutely incredible. I think the message that it conveys is so nuanced. And I'd just like to touch on a few things within this. So, Joe, as you know, we're going to go on to talk about the importance of the sun, specifically in Igbo culture. There is a huge amount of mythology that concerns the sun when it relates to Acebe's writing. And also, it's very, very important to note that this relationship is not a happy one.

This poem opens with a reduction, with a taking away, the withdrawing of the unlawful. arms of the sun. And what I really think is quite incredible about the way this poem opens is the fact that you feel this sense of cold. The sun is usually portrayed in very positive terms. It brings light, warmth, excitement, renewal, regrowth. But here it offers you something that is detached and removed. So, Joe, let's talk about this first answer. I'd love to. And like you said, there is so much nuance in this opening of this poem. And I can't to get into it. So just to zoom out slightly and to think a little bit about what this opening of the poem is doing in broad terms. Now, as you mentioned, the Igbo mythology is really,

really important here. So the Igbo are an ethnic group, which largely reside in parts of modern day Nigeria, to which Acebate belonged. Now, anyone who's read or heard about Acebate's novels will know that oftentimes his work explores the way in which traditional Igbo culture was in many ways oppressed or kind of absorbed within the colonial framework, especially the arrival of Christianity onto mainland Africa. Like many religions, it's pantheistic, meaning it has more than one guard. There is a central god by the name of Chukwu, and then there are several different gods that represent different elemental aspects, so things like fertility in the earth, thunder and lightning. And then, I guess most pivotly for this poem, we have the figure of Anyanwu,

who is the female embodiment of the solar disk, the sun. And she wrote, represents not only the warmth of the sun, but also things like good fortune, wisdom, things that are commonly associated with the sun. Now, straight away, many of our listeners will pick up on the fact that the sun in a chair-based poem is portrayed as masculine when Anyanwu is a feminine presence. So again, we have that blurring of the distinctions between an Igbo tradition and other religious traditions, because ordinarily solar deities, things like Ra in the Egyptian pantheon or Helios in the Greek tradition, are portrayed as male things.

Because not exclusively, there are other female solar deities, but broadly speaking, the sun is portrayed as masculine and the moon tends to be a feminine symbol. So already we've got that sense of the sun's importance to about culture is there right from the outset, but the actual specifics of the gender of the sun disk are blurred here. So then we come to where is this male influence coming from? It could be from one of those other traditions that I've mentioned, things like the Greek or the Egyptian pantheon. And of course, the way in which the sun is portrayed in the Christian Bible is very much as a sort of conduit for God's presence. on earth. So God creates the sun and it becomes a symbol of his love for humanity, that it warms and it protects. And again, that is therefore conveyed through the masculine presence of God and the Bible. But also, the thing that I think is really subtly done in these lines is the allusion

to a non-Christian or Igbo tradition. It's calling back to classical mythology. Because as Maya mentioned, what we have really focused on in these lines is the arms of the sun. And to my mind, And this is a callback to Homer and the classical tradition, because in Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, one of the most common epithets that we find is the phrase rosy fingered dawn. So again, we have that sense of the sun as something tactile, as something really physical, something has some kind of ability to embrace the earth or people on it. So again, the thing I love about these lines is it's typical of a Chebe. And so far as he is drawing on several different traditions simultaneously without aligning himself with any of them.

I just think the way in which he's able to do that so quickly and so subtly is just a reminder of how wonderful a poet he was. And it's really important to note as well that that tactility is what makes this poem so incredible at conveying the message it does. Because to keep it simple, if you have arms to reach out to something, you also have the ability to take them away. Now, when this poem details what is effectively a toxic and repetitive cycle, between the sun and the moon, between two lovers.

But importantly, it is a cycle. Now, I do have a few thoughts on why the sun here is portrayed as masculine. And I think your point, Joe, stands very much that this is a Chebe calling back to classical tradition, more so than it is to any other tradition. Because when you take Homer's Iliad, for example, when you take the Bible, masculine figures are built in such a way that there are values that are showing. across all of these texts. They value strength, assertion, aggression, power.

Now, these are tenets of the sun that we see through this poem. We see he wears out his temper on the ground. We see that there is darts of anger. Now, by translating the sun into this masculine figure, I believe what Achebe does is actually offer this figure much more power from the outset because of how traditional readers would interpret and masculine figure to be.

By contrast, the moon figure that we are introduced to or the evening, as described in this poem, is patient, soft, and mellows out the sun. So, again, we have this real dichotomy of the masculine feminine, a dichotomy between peace and anger, between lust and comfort. So you're really interpreting these figures in completely polarized ways. 100%. And I think one of the things, of course, that kind of if we think about the Igbo tradition, but also the classical Greek pantheon, one of the things those pantheistic religions offer, which maybe the sort of Judeo-Christian tradition struggles to do so, is that sense of the arbitrary nature of gods, the way in which they are prone to anger, neglect, the way in which they can give on the one hand and take with the other. And by framing the sun in this poem through the lens of those pantheistic religions, that sense of jealousy, that sense of cruelty that the sun actually is demonstrated to have in this poem,

that sense of withdrawing its warmth, withdrawing its affections, something that's temperamental, something that's angry, is something that makes a lot more sense. Because obviously when you have these traditions evolving, these religions growing with decades and centuries, of course people would regard a god or god. that represents the sun as something fickle, because the sun is not consistent, nor is the rain. Those religions that are rooted in elemental forces oftentimes capture something more real about the way in which nature works, something that is, on the one hand, a provider, on the other hand, something that causes suffering and drought and pain than perhaps those

religions like Judaism, Christianity, that have to kind of reconcile those cruel aspects of the world with a god that is fundamentally good and loving. think it's fascinating that when you explore more Western religions that consider what balance means, a lot of the time it's construed as fairness, justness, consistency. But here what we actually see is a power balance that is constantly reasserting itself. It's a battle over finding that middle ground. And it's never found, but it's constantly in flux. Yeah, absolutely. And I think it's not a coincidence that even within the Bible, when we look at most of the most memorable references to the Sun, they are Old Testament references.

And the Old Testament God is perhaps more similar to the gods we've mentioned here because the God in the Old Testament is more arbitrary. He is less consistent. He is more prone to vengeance and anger. And I think in many ways that is a sort of divine presence that Aceba, it seems like, understands a little bit more than the more consistent or loving God that we get in the New Testament. And there's one line that I really, really love in this poem. And I know I've said it, I love this poem so much.

But the line describes a relationship as a slush of love's combustion. Now that, I think, is so excellently worded. But you also explore the fact that in Igbo cosmology, a lot of these things come with a pairing. So you're looking at the sun and the moon. You're looking at thunder and lightning. Balance is found within the space between these figures, not found individually within one or the other.

So every single aspect that you explore within this poem has a counterbalance, has an opposite. And I think when you're approaching this poem as kind of assuming that it might be a simplistic love poem, when you're introduced to a line like the slush of love's combustion, you're actually exploring something that is messy and uncertain and out of balance. But, you know, it becomes increasingly clear as you go through the poem, that the repetition allows you to constantly find that balance again.

100%. And also a sense of danger in that line. That sense of combustion is on the one hand, this kind of, I mean, if you're sort of part of the metaphor, kind of sparks flying as a very traditional romantic cliche. But of course, combustion can also lead to dire consequences, death, explosions. You know, in a modern context, we would regard that to be sort of synonymous with nuclear disaster, all kinds of things that are very negative. And I think once again, a Chebe is painting an image of this relationship whereby the female presence has to be continually conciliatory, continually adapting to whatever wild mood swings,

the male presence, in this case the sun brings at the end of each day. There is this sense that the female presence in this poem has to constantly be ready to sort of put out fires, to be constantly ready to flex and to adapt to whatever the male presence demands of her. On the one hand, the male presence can be very loving and very affectionate, but then, as we've said, that love, that affection can be withdrawn and it can be replaced with anger, seemingly at a moment's notice. And I can't help but wonder how many relationships that Achebe had witnessed that kind of followed those patterns, the idea of the masculine presence and a relationship sort of playing God. And again, anyone who's read Achebe's novels will know that image of the patriarch whose word is law, who's incredibly aggrateful.

and the way they deal out what they believe to be right is one of the most enduring things about his poems. I mean, the main figure, Oconquo, in Things Fall Apart, is this kind of very emotional male figure who at times is admired, but also is this kind of very aggressive, arbitrary dictator of what he believes to be right. And the relationship between a Conquo and his children, but also A Conquo and his wives in Things Fall Apart is definitely something that resonates with me in this poem. I think we can see that same relationship play out here. And the fact that he's extrapolated some of those learnings from real life and found natural symbols on which to project them is just so impressive to me. I couldn't agree more. And I think it's important to note that as easy as it is to approach this poem in isolation,

we do need to remember that Beware Soul Brother is actually a collection of poems that detail a Chebe's experience during and after Nigerian independence. So this poem is accompanied by poems about war and suffering and colonialism. So when we talk about relationships, we're not just approaching this poem in terms of love relationships. We're also looking at colonial relationships. And for anyone who takes, you know, the study of English literature or poetry to a higher level, like university level, will learn that when you talk about colonization, it's very often construed as a male figure. So I really think that there's a lot to be said when you explore this poem as a relationship to think about the wider context because not only could you take this as Acebe writing about a slightly toxic relationship that he perhaps endured, but we're also looking at a relationship between colonizer and colonized that was the absolute center of Acebe's world for a very long time and still is an incredibly relevant part of the conversation.

I think that's a fascinating point. It's not something I'd really thought about, but you're right, the fact this poem begins with this dominant presence withdrawing. I mean, we can't help but read that in parallel with the fact that after, you know, more than 100 years, the British presence in Nigeria was withdrawing. And again, I say withdrawing because, of course, just because independence is declared one year, it doesn't mean the influence vanishes overnight. I mean, a lot of the institutions in Nigeria, whether education institutions, a civil service, the broadcasting agencies, which actually Achébe worked for, a lot of those were. modeled on British institutions. So this process of unbetween the colonized nation, Nigeria and the colonize of Britain is actually not dissimilar to the idea of a marriage where there is a major power imbalance like this one. I mean, it's a really interesting way of looking at the

poem, I think, to view the female presence as sort of indicative of perhaps Nigeria or perhaps just a sort of colonized presence more broadly. And working out how it relates to this incredibly arbitrary, aggressive, you know, occasionally generous but broadly fearful presence of the coloniser. And it's so worth exploring that because, again, we finish this poem with the colonized, with the female presence in this poem, having power. It's how we close this poem. We are left with the impression of the evening, the night, the female, having power. So as we approach the end of the first season of Beyond the Verse,

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to Joe and I at Poemanalysis.com and we will answer your questions in upcoming Q&A episodes. Welcome back to this episode of Beyond the Verse where Maya and I are discussing Chimua Rcebe's love cycle. And I would just like to focus on one of the images in this poem that I find most enduringly powerful, which is that the sky is plowing the vast acres of heaven.

And the thing I love about that is that it kind of goes against the traditional images of the sun. because obviously you have lots of images in different religious traditions about the sun chariot being drawn by horses. And, you know, it's the popular image of Apollo and other religions as well. It's a boat in the Egyptian tradition that rar sails across the sky. And the thing I think that's really interesting about both of those is there isn't a sense of toil in the same way. The chariot is something we generally associate with being a very ornate way of moving through a space. Again, with the sea, of course, not to suggest that sailing is easy, but there is that sense of elegance.

with moving across the ocean of the sky. The image that Acebe uses is one that has connotations of effort, of sweat, of suffering almost, especially under the heat of the sun itself. And I think that that just gives up her much greater depth because you have this kind of reason that this sun is so aggressive and angry because he is meant to be an embodiment of somebody who themselves have had to suffer and toil all day long.

Now, it is far from excuses the kind of aggressive behavior. of the male figure. But I think it really humanises what is ordinarily a divine presence. But what do you think about that, my? I think, to be honest, it goes back to that question of balance, right? Because, again, we're exploring a very complex relationship. It is not something that we can just sit and say is effectively a bad relationship. We are looking at something that has a huge level of scale. I think humanizing the son or humanizing the masculine figure in the way that he does in this poem offers us that sense of balance. It gives us some. something to write against, you know, and there is a level of sympathy.

There is a sort of understanding that you come to meet with this figure, because despite the aggression and despite the anger, the patience that is offered to this figure by its contrast, the feminized evening that waits patiently, you begin to feel more a spectator of this relationship than you do intimately involved within it, as opposed to the way that you open this poem and you as a reader feel quite close to that sense of warmth, I think the poem actually, you know, in contrast to many poems that we read on this, actually begins to push you out of it. And I think what that serves to do is not only afford us that sense of sympathy, but by relegating you almost to this observer figure, it makes it a much more natural cycle. And, you know, the poem is

called love cycle. It's about something that is unstoppable. It's something that happens with or without action from the listener, from the reader, from whoever is involved as a third party. I think it's a really nuanced way of writing this relationship because it would be so, so easy for a Chebe to write a bad love poem. And this is not that. I think just to pick up on that idea about the nuance of the way love is portrayed and the way in which its counterweight is often shown to be aggression, it's almost as though the sun's expressions of love and its expressions of fury come from the same place.

And I think one of the other symbols that Aceba uses that I just want to touch on because, again, like the opening lines of the poem, I just find this to be so loaded is when he describes the darts of anger that are thrown by the female figure. And the reason I think that's so interesting is because it, again, drawing on several different traditions. Now, when I see that phrase, the darts of anger in a love poem, or what is purportedly a love poem, The place that my mind goes to is Cupid's arrows, that notion of a weapon, something that is intended to cause pain and yet becomes a symbol of love, that idea about how love can be painful. I think that's a very sort of well-understood image, but also the place it calls back to me is William Blake's Jerusalem, bring me my arrows of desire. And once again, you have a Chebe drawing on these different traditions that classical on the one hand, when the figure of Cupid or the figure of Apollo, of course, is an archer and also associated with the sun.

and then he draws upon William Blake's poem Jerusalem, which is, of course, very much rooted in a Christian tradition. And finally, whenever you have that symbol of arrows, that symbol of darts or missiles being thrown at somebody, you have the symbol of violence, which could represent the ways in which the colonial force of Britain oppressed and killed many people in Nigeria over more than a century that Britain was a colonial power there.

And again, his ability to hold these different influences is in parallel without aligning himself with any of them more than the other is one thing I find so interesting. The arrow, the dart as a symbol of desire, a symbol of aggression, a symbol of a Christian tradition, a symbol of a classical tradition. He is able to hold those things together, and it's remarkable. And coexistence, I think, is one of the key messages for this poem. We've talked a lot about the harmony between aggression and love, between the sun and the moon, between these relationships that continually coexist within this poem. And I think it's really fascinating and maybe to just pull us out of the poem for a second. Joe and I have discussed how this poem,

when you view it through a post-colonial lens, could explore the relationship between the coloniser and the colonized. Now, I think it's really interesting when you explore, particularly post-colonial poetry, because there is a common thread that love and aggression or love and war are often written about in tandem, they become synonymous with being able to show a level of passion or feeling towards something. And one of the poems that comes to mind is Ocean Vong's My Father writes from prison. Now, I know we talk about Ocean Vong a lot in this podcast because Joe and I both love him, but there is a line from that poem that goes, I don't know desire other than the need to be shattered and rebuilt. Now, the language of destruction that encompasses the post-colonial

thought. The one that explores the effect of war and how to live through and pass that is one that I always find recurs in poems like Love Cycle in Ocean Vong's work. Now we're looking at countries that experienced extreme suffering at the hands of a coloniser. So when they talk about love and relationships, more often than not, they carry the burden of the impact of that war. So love cycle for me is a poem that not only touches on how a relationship can be fed by passion, also how it can be fed by adversity. I think that's a fascinating point. In any way in which we can talk about Ocean Bawong is fine by me. But I think it's a really interesting comparison because in many ways, both those poets are writing across culture. You know, when you think about the

moment in which Bachebe is writing, and I alluded to this earlier on, but it's really important for listens to get a sense of just how in flux his life must have felt at this point. Not only on a personal level going from somebody that was unknown to somebody that was a global literary figure in the space of a few years, little over a decade, but also the fact that the country he was living in over the course of 10 years had gone from being a colonised nation to an independent nation, had gone through a civil war. There was a sense that the country was being continually destroyed and rebuilt, the country, of course, that Acebay loves. Again, a lot of the ones, work is about writing back, writing across oceans, and that sense of being pulled in more than

one direction and having to reconcile things that are ultimately probably irreconcilable, the past and the present, a foreign culture, a immediate culture. I think that sense of being destroyed and remade is something that both these poems share. I could just touch on one of the things as the poem draws towards a conclusion that I find really powerful and memorable about it. And it's actually an interesting call back to our last episode, which was on Emily Dickinson's, because I could not stop the death. It's about the way in which the sun becomes a symbol of a very finite amount of time on the one hand and an infinite amount on the other. Because obviously, if we think about the way this relationship in love cycle plays out over the course of a day, you have this massive sort of spectrum of emotions that we get. We get desire. We get absence. We get rage. We get fatigue. And eventually we get a a kind of a calmness that is, of course, meant to reflect the setting of the sun, the point to which the sun's heat reduces, and its colours soften, and it becomes this symbol of something much more conciliatory.

Now, on the one hand, we have there this enormous span of emotion, and it almost speaks to a length of time, because normally we would imagine that that level of emotion, that range of emotion needs to occur over a long stretch of time, because those emotions are so varied. And yet we also have the sun as an image of eternity, because, of course, the sun will rise again tomorrow and the day after that, and we often associate it with something enduring and never-ending. So the way in which this poem is on the one

hand using the sun as a metaphor for continual change, for unpredictability, for myriad and contradictory emotions, and yet also being a symbol of permanence and resoluteness, is fascinating. And I think when we view this in the context of an unhappy relationship, which is occasionally, has sort of moments of joy within it, it becomes this fascinating symbol because when you have the image of the sun that we associate with permanent, we associate with longevity, that's kind of innately assumed to be a good thing. But what if the thing that is enduring and the thing that has longevity is itself painful, is itself detrimental? And again, I can't help but think of a passage in the Bible, Psalm 113, which reads, from the rising of the sun to its setting, the name of the Lord is to be

praised. And again, on the one hand, that is a very kind of hopeful image that, you know, God is going to be there forever. But on the other hand, it's this incredibly dictatorial kind of harping voice about you must do this and you must do that. And there is no reprieve from those things. And again, I know I've repeating myself here, but the way that Aceba is able to hold those symbols in tandem, the positive and the negative, is one of the things about the poem and about Acebe's writing more broadly, that I just find truly unique. I mean, what do you think about that, Maya?

I think you're absolutely right. And I think compression is one of the ways in which Acebe is able to play with this sense of scale and this sense of time, because, of course, the length of time that Acebe is talking about here, the Sun's eternal existence, gives you an extortionate amount of time

to think about this relationship, to think about its continuations. But I really love the fact that you can read this poem from first line to last line and then read it again and then read it again. It is built to be read cyclically. Now, of course, we finish this poem in the evening as the sun and the evening begin their embrace. But let's not forget that the poem opens with the withdrawal of that, with the refusal of that. So the central question really becomes, how do you talk about a relationship that doesn't have a way out and yet has a so many negative associations within it that you have to fight your way out of.

This is a poem that is deeply embattled, really. Yeah, and how do you reconcile something that is on the one hand unchanging with the fact that the unchangingness of it is defined by inconsistency? I mean, it's this really interesting paradox because the son's behavior, the behavior of this male figure is incredibly erratic, incredibly inconsistent, incredibly vary. And the only constant is that it will happen again. For sure. And I often find, and I'd be so interested to know your thoughts on this, Joe, but I find that you leave this poem more confused than you are when you enter it. Every time I reread this poem, I think that it's going to be a little

bit more simplistic than it is. And I leave with a real feeling of kind of depth and a sadness about the state of this relationship. And I never quite know how to reconcile that feeling with the images that it's trying to portray. I think of one of the other episodes we did, which was on William Butler E.8 is the second coming, because again, what you have there is you have the expectation of resolution as evoked by the title of Yates' poem. When the second coming comes, that is when there will be certainty. Christ will arrive and the story will resolve itself. And the fact that poem ends with doubt rather than resolution really throws the reader off. And I have a similar thing here. You know, the setting of the sun, the end of the day, we've come to

expect those moments to evoke a sense of spiritual or emotional resolution as well. And the absence of that, the absence of a lesson here, there is no sense of progress, there is merely a sense of repetition. And it is unsettling. And of course, you know, many of our listeners, I'm sure, be aware that Acebe was extraordinarily familiar, not only with the H's work, but with that exact poem, because the title of his most famous work, things fall apart, is a line from that poem. So there's every possibility that that poem would have influenced the writing of this one as well. And maybe that's an interesting discussion to sort of close this episode on is the way in which Achebe's poem is sort of engaging with other writers that we've talked about over the course of

this series of Beyond the Verse. I mean, I think Yates is very strongly evoked here. I mentioned earlier that the way he uses the sun reminds me of the way Emily Dickinson uses the sun, because I could not stop the death. I mentioned William Blake earlier on. I mean, we talked about his poem The Tiger in a previous episode, but I think Achebe's almost gravitational pull to hold things in his orbit, these myriad influences, and pick and choose them as he sees fit, is one of the things that makes him such a remarkable writer in writing in such a unique moment of history. Absolutely.

And, you know, one thing I'd like to touch on really before we end this episode is that I would hate for listeners to walk away from this and think, you know, why were Joe and Meyer talking about this poem like it was a love poem? We didn't talk about the title. It is called Love Cycle. This poem is not one that is. is setting the intention of you walking away thinking this is a toxic relationship, full stop. It is very literally creating that cycle of love.

That is the most important thing at the center of this. And yes, there's passion and aggression and anger and peace and interplays of power. But love is the core of this. And I think it's so multifaceted the way that Acebe deals with this. I think it's a pretty fair time to mention that, you know, Chebebitt wasn't writing out of nothing. He was incredibly well educated. His father was a teacher.

He attended elite schools. He won prize upon prize upon prize. He would have been a hugely wide reader. He would have taken on so much from other poets around him, other writers, people in his orbit, as you say, Joe. So he was interpolating and holding all of these different poets and different words within his space. And I think it's so evident when you read a poet who reads other poems. because it's so impossible to not have those interpolations or those callbacks, you know?

Absolutely, and anyone who listened to our episode on Wale Soyinka's telephone conversation will know that I have, you know, a bit of a fascination with the African Writers' Conference of 1962, which Achebe attended, probably as the premier writer on the continent at the time. And that sense of interplay, that sense of this moment being the moment

that African literature really arrived on the global scene. And of course, it's worth noting that the reason that was in the 1960s, not before, was a point of access, a point of the willingness of Western publishers to put out this work. It's not that there wasn't work being produced beforehand. But this moment in which this series of great writers, Achebe being one of them, So Yinka being another, were in the same place at the same time in Uganda.

I mean, I'd be fascinated to hear A Chebe if he was still with us, about how those moments, those interactions with fellow African writers and writers from the African diaspora like Langston Hughes, how they influenced his poetry, because when I think of a Cheba, I think of him as being an absolute sponge, you know, of culture, of folklore, of history, of other literature, his ability to absorb those traditions, whether it's individual lines or whether it's a thematic preoccupation and then reproduce them in a unique way is one of the things that makes him so remarkable and makes those

interactions all the more important for a poet like him. Again, we spoke about Emily Dickinson last time as somebody who largely lived her life devoid of those immediate interactions. Achebe, you know, couldn't be further from the truth. He was a voracious reader, a voracious consumer of the work of others. And it just goes to show how varied the poetic world can be. You can have poets on the one hand who really thrive on those interactions and you can have others who don't really need them to produce their work. Well, thank you so much, Joe, for such an excellent way to end our first season. I absolutely love that conversation and I cannot wait to explore a bunch of new poets next time. For now, I just want to say a huge thank you for the last

20 episodes and just to remind listeners, while you're waiting for us to come back in the new year 2025, you can go back and listen to our entire catalogue of podcast episodes in the meantime. But for now it's goodbye from me and goodbye for me and the whole team at Permanalysis.com and Poetry Plus. Thank you.