Aspects of Texure in Wole Soyinka's "Death in the Dawn" and "In Memory of Segun Awolowo"

Abstract

This paper attempts to delineate some linguistic features that can be useful to decode the language of Wole Soyinka's selected poems. The study focuses, more specifically, on the discourse patterns of cohesion that realize coherence of "Death in the Dawn" and "In Memory of Segun Awolowo", two poems drawn from Wole Soyinka's Indare and Other Poems. Given that these poems prove to be obscure and difficult for some scholars and readers (Osundare, 1983; Adejare, 1992; Osakwe, 1995), the work shows that the text-forming resources through which the clauses of these poems have a semantic unity cannot be well deciphered without referring to the specific context, that is cultural and situational, in which they are used. The work, therefore, starts with the discussion of the concept of texture and then focuses on the way contextual variables (the field, mode and tenor) are realized in the poems.