darker

Theme 7: Human nature - The darker side

Wole Soyinka
Tina Morris
Langston Hughes
Adrian Mitchell
Robert Frost
Elizabeth Hart
A Survey of Opinions and Approaches by Five Poets in this Theme
Several poets in this selection, representing the darker side of human nature, attack racism as it appears in all sorts of situations. Soyinka as a Nigerian in London seeks to rent accommodation in Telephone Conversation but is refused for being too black and so unacceptable to an unseeing aristocrat potential landlady. In one demanding blank verse stanza of 35 lines, Soyinka dramatises the to and fro of a most painful inquiry for a room. Quoting snippets of his conversation with the resulting impenetrable silences, the poet intersperses his own reactions to make a strong critical statement about how ever-present, everyday and insidious racism shows up in the practicalities of life. Frustrated, the poet insults her back with a moderately crude joke.
Hughes takes up the same experience this time in America with a mock comic ballad narrating a negligent landlord who calls in the police and wins a court case against his "Negro" tenant who withholds the rent. Presented in traditional ballad form, this poem gradually unravels into block letter headlines in blank verse, as events concatenate into ridiculous melodrama. Still in America, Elizabeth Hart takes up the same theme with a 9 line verse featuring a white female Hypocrite who despite speaking the truths of religion declines to sit beside a Negro even "once".

Other expressions of the darker side of human nature are taken up in Mitchell's Leaflets, depicting ten very different reactions by the public to him while distributing leaflets, ranging from glad acceptance to insulting rejection. Mitchell suggests this unpredictable variety in reaction is typical and at the same time very frightening. The darker side of the unforeseen is also taken up by Frost in "Out, Out -" narrating a very sad apparently real event where a boy dies after using a chain saw in lush Vermont. The sheer horror of the spurting arm and the rapid decline to death "little - less - nothing!" is concisely dramatised by the poet to dramatise the horror of accidental death in the young and healthy.
Morris's In the beginning identifies the darker side in creeping technology that substitutes nature with an artificial garden where flowers bloom at the touch of a switch, where fans create instant breezes, underground heating and waterfalls 'feed' artificial grass, coloured lights and music 'soothe their god' and where hybridised flowers of most unusual variety and colour have leaves that never fall. Mitchell's biting mockery of synthetic modern environments takes on a theological dimension, "In the beginning. . and the refrain to please their god ...visible to their god ...to soothe their god... creating their god", to suggest that the people have forsaken the tried and true ways of generations (presumably of natural ones) for the new gods of technology of their own making. He clinches his argument with a one-line third and last stanza implying that people have strayed into inauthentic life verging on dark rites through their unnatural slavery to the technology of their own making. To him, this regression of civilisation is very challenging and current evidence of the age-old fear that the darker side of human nature is just under the surface. He highlights our helplessness in realising it when we stray.
These poets reveal impacts of the darker side of human nature in racism, in people's unpredictable and irrational reactions to events and in the unnatural regress of apparently civilised societies. In my reading of this selection, I was struck by the starkly sudden appearances the darker side makes in ordinary lives. These poets act as contemporary prophets issuing timely reminders of its all-pervasive power and presence.

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Page written by G. Smith 9 June 2000 for internal use of GT students only.