Kofi Awoonor’s fascination with the Anlo-Ewe dirge as a poetic form has been established in various critiques of his work. What has invariably been highlighted, is his sometimes liberal borrowing from the Anlo-Ewe poet-cantor Vinoko Akpalu, whose fatalistic commentaries on his personal life resonate loudly in Awoonor’s poetry. However, not much attention has been focused on Awoonor’s own views regarding the human condition, morbidity and mortality. This article discusses Awoonor’s attitude to death in his poetry, particularly as it relates to the poet’s acceptance of the inevitability, anticipation and, sometimes, defiance of death. It also highlights Awoonor’s evolution as a poet with a distinct voice.

The theme of death features prominently in world poetry, but attitudes to death vary from poet to poet – Sylvia Plath, Emily Dickinson, John Donne, Alfred Lord Tennyson, etc. Death could be mocked and demystified, as in Donne’s popular sonnet ‘Death Be Not Proud’; seen as terminal, regenerative, inevitable as a normal rite of passage in the life cycle, an eternal reward for the individual’s good deeds, or simply ‘going home’ to join one’s ancestors. For Tagore, death is the ‘Great Unknowable’ where the ‘mortal bonds’ perish.

Often, in dealing with death, the individual poet either projects his personal views on life and death, or grounds his views in his people’s culture and worldview; or conflates both. Awoonor’s understanding of death was imbibed at a very tender age, and it has to do with his people’s belief in the idea of death as the result of the interplay of cause and effect relationships, both physical and metaphysical; a fact he re-affirms in ‘Reminiscences of Earlier Days’ (1976).

In his poetry, Awoonor explores death from a multiplicity of perspectives. He treats the theme of death as if he is constantly expecting his own death; he sees death in a Manichean / cathartic sense; as a disruptive natural phenomenon; as an opportunity to link up with ‘those gone ahead’ in the cyclic trajectory of birth, death and renewal and as an emblem of his accomplishment of, or failure, in life’s tasks – divine or self-imposed. There is also a sense of ambivalence, or equivocation, in the way the poet confronts death; he is in constant dread of death, sometimes defiant and unafraid.