Temporal Metaphors and Images in the Poetry of Niyi Osundare

Abstract

Poets draw metaphors freely from any field of human endeavour. Niyi Osundare, the Yoruba-born Nigerian poet, exercises this freedom to the maximum, making some of his poems a hybrid of eclectic metaphors. As revealed by stylistic analyses, he draws lexical items from the concept of time, history, and the calendar. The poems analyzed are not to be relied upon as authentic sources of historical or geographic information, but of aesthetic beauty and pleasure. The metaphors are a mixture of Yoruba and
European concepts of time.