Niyi Osundare : The Eye of the Earth

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Background of the Poet

Niyi osundare (1947)belongs to the second generation of Nigeria poet.whose poem is marked by stylistic assesibility.

These poet use scope of Nigerian poetry readership.they also try to make important political statement and redirect people's thinking towards positive change.osundare has written numerous collections starting with the songs of the market places(1983)

His must resent poetry book is" city without people; the katrina peom(2011)

The eye of the earth(1986)is his stead collection and represent a journey into the poet homeland where he encounters a landscale that create tension between what he sees before him and what he recollect out of his memory. 


OURS TO PLOUGH AND NOT TO PLOUNDER  


The earth is ours to plough and plant

The hoe is her barber  

The dibbles her dimple  

Out with mattocks and matchets  

Bring calabash tray rocking baskets  

Let the sweat which smells earth roots Relieve heavy heaps of their  

Turberous burdens  


Let wheat fields raise their  

Bread some hands  

To the ripening sun 

Let legumes cloth the naked bosom  

Of shivering mounds  

Let the pawpaw swell and swing  

It headward breast  


Let water spring  

From earth’s unfathomed and fountain  

Let gold rush  

From her deep unsearchable mines  

Hitch up a ladder to the dodging sky  

Let us put a sun in every night  

Our earth is an opened grain house  

A bustling barn in some far  

Uncharted jungle 

A distant gem in a rough unhappy dust  

The earth is  

Ours to work not to waste  

Ours to man not main  

This earth is ours to plough not to plunder. 


Analysis  

In the poem, “Ours to plough and not to plounder”. Osundare holds the hoe and picks the plough, wear the cloak of a farmer to sow the seed of ecocentricisim in the barren brains of the people who take the earth for granted as they dig deep dibbles into the bowels to plunder gold and another metal.  

He personifies the earth as a woman as he say  

“The earth is ours to plough and plant  

The hoe is her barber  

The dibble is her dimple"

The poet personae wants the earth to be ploughed only for agriculture purposes and not ravage her in the name of excarvation, mining and digging for the treasures in her womb.  

Finally the poem re-enforces anti anthropogenic philosophy, as he feels that the earth is meant for all of us to work and not to exploit it natural resources. The earth is the giver and provider of life. It state emphatically that the earth should not be destroyed, damaged and mained for satiating the overgrowing monstrous hungry of the human for their material pleasures.

Themes 

1. Theme of Benefit of Agriculture to human 

2. Theme of God's treasure in the soil. 

3. Theme of Nature


Poetic Devices 

1. Personification 

2. Metaphor

3. Imagery

4. Alliteration 

5. Hyperbole 



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