Poetry and Redeeming Time

Finding the light at the end of the unending road.

’Tis far off,
And rather like a dream than an assurance
That my remembrance warrants
William Shakespeare, The Tempest, Act I, Scene II, 44–45

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting…
…Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness
But trailing clouds of glory do we come.
William Wordsworth, Ode: Intimations of Immortality

The sense that profane reality is not our real home is one that pervades myth and literature since the beginning of the human story up even until relatively recent times. The 1991 Booker Prize winning novel ‘The Famished Road’ by Ben Okri tells the story of Azaro, an ‘abiku’ or ‘spirit child’ who is born into a life of suffering and poverty in Africa from the land of spirits, where he is eternally happy. The moving and brilliant device of the novel is that in African tradition a spirit child is one who recoils from the suffering and indifference of our world and seeks to die and return to the land of origins, but Azaro, out of the weariness of cycles of rebirth and out of love for the suffering of his parents, chooses to stay, and in doing so asks the great…