July 09, 2015
Like every long travel (the case where someone has been away for a very long time) part of the feelings such a person will develop are naka ot so different from the ones the poet developed before writing or composing this poem.
Bernard Binlin Dadie, an ivorian poet, wrote this masterpiece to prove to Africa,his motherland, that he had compared home and abroad and realised that home is better; he even mentioned how waste of time, travelling has been in line 3 and 10; "Out of the storm and squalls of fruitless journeys"
The feelings of the poet in "Dry Your Tears, Africa" brought about the following themes: the theme of assurance, nost
algia, futility and the themes did cloth the poem with reality.
Before taking a deep examination into the themes poem, let's briefly look at the form the poem took. The poet made use of very simple dictions which are everyday words. The five stanza poem carried uneven lines per stanza but no end rhyme occurred.
Beautiful poetic devices like repetitions, symbolisms, etc were the recipes in the poem.
The theme of Assurance radiated throughout the poem, stanza 1, 2, 3 and 5 have it. This assurance can be divided into two, namely the assurance of returning home and the assurance of hope for better tomorrow."Dry your tears, Africa!/Your children come back to you" was repeated in stanza 1 and 5 to maintain the fact that there was no going back on the issue of returning home; then stanza 2 revealed how the poet and his fellow African sojourners planned to sail or fly home "Through the crest of the wave and the babbling of the breeze"
The assurance of hope for better tomorrow was evident at the final part of the poem:
"Dry your tears, Africa!
Your children come back to you
their hands full of play things
and their hearts full of love.
They return to cloth you
in their dreams and their hopes."
The theme of Nostalgia is always cropping up in any discussion of home and abroad. Whenever a traveller remembers how home used to be, he/she wishes to be home. After the poet compared in stanza 3, "We have drunk/From all the springs/of ill fortune/and of glory"; he remembered how home was and confessed in stanza 4:
"And our senses are now opened
to the splendour of your beauty
to the smell of your forests
to the charm of your waters
to the clearness of your skies
to the caress of your sun
And to the charm of your foliage pearled by the dens".
The Theme of Futility in chasing glorified greener pastures only to find out that life is not a bed full of roses. The poet brought the thought to the mind of the readers make the readers understand that there are two sides to every coin of travelling: ill fortune and glory. He concluded that his travels were "fruitless journeys".
At this juncture, the feelings of the poet must have been understood to be resentful based on the above descriptions.
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Samuel C. Enunwa aka samueldpoetry
(the Leo with wings, the candidate of heaven)
