ABSTRACT

Poetic language is the language in which the words are artfully selected and combined in their best order in order to convey thoughts meaningfully. Children’s poetic language is not left out. Children’s poets are more careful in selecting sounds and words in order to achieve a desired effect on the reader. Consequently, the thrust of this study is to highlight the linguistic constituents of Nigerian children’s poetry with a view to revealing its characteristic features that lead to its aesthetics and meaning. To achieve this aim, two collections of children’s poetry books with a total of thirty - three different poems were selected. While twenty nine poems out of the thirty three were selected for analysis. The method of data collection and analysis adopted in the study was direct lifting, examination and analysis of words, phrases and sentences that strikingly illustrate the linguistic features investigated, where description of those features were made in order to ascertain their effects and functions in the poems. The theories guiding the study were descriptive linguistics and Michael Halliday’s Systemic Functional Linguistic theory, while the aspects of language used were phonological, syntactical and semantic. The results of the findings from the two texts were conflated and the summary is that children’s poetry dip amply into the phonology of the language in order to communicate the subject matter of the poems. Thus, sounds of the language play a very crucial role in children’s poetry. They contribute to the aesthetics and musicality of the poems. Also, the uniformity of the word arrangements in the lines of the poems enhances the free flow of the rhythm and the euphony of the lines, while end rhyme predominates other types of rhyme in the poems. The poetry contained more of descriptive and concrete words that appear specific and clearer to a child, which the child is well acquainted with. Complexity, however, is not the feature of the poetry. At the syntactical level, the study revealed that the poets employ, mostly, simple sentences in which the lines are mostly short and the patterning, similar. Consequently, there are syntagmatic and paradigmatic relationships of grammatical items in the poems. In the case of clause structure sentences, fronting of adjuncts predominates. The poets front the message which they intend to lay more emphasises on. When it comes to semantics, children’s poets play with language as well. Different devices of language such as metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, simile, euphemism, hyperbole etc are found in the poems. Thus, imagery is found to be an important feature of children’s poetry, which helps to awaken the child’s imaginative ability and to picture the idea the poet is trying to communicate.

CHAPTER ONE

INTRODUCTION

1.1 Background of the Study    

One striking characteristic of human beings is our ability to use language and to use it creatively. The relevance of language to man is inestimable. It is a vital medium through which human beings are able to communicate their desires, thoughts, and emotions. Therefore, it stands as the only means through which people in a community, successfully, interact and disseminate information. Ideas forming in human minds are generated in language and transmitted through language in an organized pattern. It is in the light of this that Chomsky, quoted in Akmajian et al., asserts that:

language is a mirror of mind in a deep and significant sense. It is a product of intelligence created anew in each individual by operations that lie far beyond the reach of will or consciousness (9).

Language is a mirror of mind in that it reflects what is in the mind. It is through language that a person’s thought is laid bare. Akmajian et al., go further to state that the study of language is ultimately the study of the human mind and that as we come to understand more about human language, we will correspondingly understand more about the processes of human thought and may as well discover abstract principles that govern its structure and use which when put together helps to convey ones thoughts and feelings to others.

Similarly, Finch writing on the language as an instrument of thought contends that:

a common view of language is that it is merely a tool of thought, that we have ideas forming in our minds for which we need to find the appropriate words: the words are the ideas because our ideas are generated in language (34).

        He goes further to state that “most people feel that they have not really understood something until they have been able to express it in language”. Language does not just express thought, it also creates it. Akwanya quoted in Nsolibe also gives the definition of language as:

a means of conveying information about social reality, about human nature, about the states of consciousness of the writer, and their personal visions of life or information about values and practices relevant for everyday life in a  community (46).

These definitions of language, given by some scholars, centre on language as a means of conveying information about the contents of the mind. Thus, through language, the mind of a writer is x – rayed to the readers in an ordered and artistic form to communicate messages about the society in which we live and the nature of people that live in it.

Literary writing is an art that uses language as its basic tool to convey thoughts that already exist in human mind to society for the purpose of education, correction, pleasure, entertainment etc. In other words, it is through language that poets, authors and playwrights are able to communicate their thoughts meaningfully to their readers. Therefore, one has to understand the language use in a text in order to make meaning of what is read. Language and literary creation are inextricable. One hardly talks of understanding literary work without first understanding the language in which it is created. Thus, the raw material of literature is language, in other words, we can say that literature is language which comprises certain specialized forms, selection and collections of linguistic elements unto a point of convergence.

Literature as a creative art achieves its aims through the manipulative use of language. One may then ask: What is literature?

According to Onuigbo “Literature is apparently the mirror of the society with the reflections of the image of this society captured and given flesh through language”(41).

Brooks Opines that:                                       

literature is the most sophisticated example of the process by which we come to grasp our own environment especially our human environment, with its complex and ambiguous value (9).

From the above, it can be deduced that through literature, one is able to understand the environment in which one finds oneself and as well communicates back in an ordered and artistic form through language. Literature uses language to represent man’s experience. 

Poetry is one aspect of literature through which man extends his limited experience by means of extolling one’s intellectual expectations and imaginations, thus, literature deepens one’s imaginative involvement. Ngonebu puts that “poetry is one form of literature that derives much impetus from the creative and imaginative embellishments of language” (48).

Everything, we have said so far, points on language as an important tool in effective communication and man’s artistic creation and rendering to fellow human beings. And this is strikingly similar to that espoused by Jackson and Stockwell that:

language is the human faculty that enables us to exchange meaningful messages with some of our fellow human beings by means of discourses and texts (4).

Onuigbo also submits that “no critic can adequately appreciate the beauty of literature outside language” (7). And Chomsky in Akwanya concludes that:

Today, there is no better or more promising way to explore the essential and distinctive properties of human intelligence than through a detailed investigation of the structure of this unique human possession.

      Finally, Fowler quoted in Onuigbo sums them all by stating that:

some knowledge of how language works provides some indispensable information for the students of literature, because linguistics is a theory of how language works, how it communicates meaning and what kind of structure it employs(41-42).

It is against this background that the researcher, therefore, intends to embark on a systematic and exhaustive description of the linguistic features of Nigerian children’s poetry with a view of finding out how language use in these poems contributes to meaning.

Children’s poetry selected are poems exclusively created for and addressed to schoolchildren within the age range of 6 – 14 year or schoolchildren in upper primary and junior secondary school as target audience. It is a literary genre which caters the interest of children. Thus aids in sharpening children’s imaginative experience and knowledge.

1.1.0   Background of the Poets

1.1.1  Biography of Onuora Ossie Enekwe

Ossie Enekwe was born in November, 1942 in Enugu Nigeria. He graduated in 1971 from English Department of the University of Nigeria Nsukka with 2nd class Honour (Upper Division). After the end of nearly three years of civil war, Enekwe travelled to the United States in 1972 to complete MFA in writing, M. Phil and Ph.D degrees in Theatre Arts, Columbia University, New York. He was poet-in-public service at New York, and poet-in-residence/writing fellow at other American universities.

Enekwe was the editor of Okike  African Journal of New Writing founded by Chinua Achebe at the University where he was also director of the institute of African Studies.

Some of his books are “Broken Pots” (1978), “The Last Battle and Other Stories” (1996), Matching to Kilimanjaro (2005) among others.  Enekwe was described as a prolific writer who manipulates irony and dramatic action for aesthetic effect. As an ex-soldier whom fortune has spared the death that took his kinsman and fellow poet, Chris Okigbo, in a war, it is easy to understand the unavoidable tragic notes of his stories and the “Threnodic essence” of most of his poetry which underlie the artist’s sensitivity to human friendship, citizenship and nationhood. Enekwe’s poetry and fiction on the war of 1968 – 1979 have equally thrown light on polemical issues in Nigerian writing glossed over by critics of Enekwe’s own, and most of the younger generation.

Enekwe’s dogged pursuit of academic evidence and social justice has marked him out as a scholar of note. His works, which have been translated into several world languages, have distinguished him as one of the most important writers and critics to emerge from Nigeria.

As a result of Enekwe’s outstanding contributions on the Nigeria literary creativity, Ezechi described him as a leading light among the oft-cited second generation of Nigerian literary scholars, to whom the credit of sustaining the dignified heritage of Nigerian literary intellection as diligently inaugurated by the now legendary pioneers of the tradition is most glowing. He went further to state that beyond being one of the dominant forces of Nigerian literary creativity within the same period with telling interest in all genres of literature, Enekwe’s contributions to Nigerian literature as a literary/dramatic critic rank among the most seminal.

1.1.2  Biography of Ikeogu Oke

Ikeogu Oke hails from Akanu Ohafia, Abia State, in South-Eastern Nigeria. He holds a BA English and Literary Studies from the University of Calabar and an MA in literature from the University of Nigeria, Nsukka.

Oke’s poetry has appeared in print on both sides of the Atlantic since 1988. He has published four books of poetry, “Where I was Born, “Salutes without Gun”, “Song of Success and “Doggy Tells the Truth and other Poems” one of which was selected as a Time Literature Supplement (TLS) book of the year 2010. Nadine Gordimer, the 1991 Nobel laureate in literature, wrote on Salutes without Gun, Oke’s second book of poems: “Here is a writer who finds the metaphor for what has happened and continued evolving not the way we want in our lives in Africa and the world. He does so timelessly and tellingly, as perhaps only a poet can”.    

Renowned poet, Ikeogu, has received the poetry award of the 1st Anambra Book and Creativity Festival held at the Nnamdi Azikiwe University, Awka on 24th November 2012. The award, according to a statement by thy organizers, was in recognition of Oke’s “outstanding accomplishments” in the area of poetry and the noble example he has set for the young and old in Africa and the world especially through his creative enterprise.

The poems in Song of Success and Other Poems for Children premiered during the 2nd Nigeria international Book Fair held in Lagos.

      1.2 Statement of the Problem

      It is pertinent to note that many literary studies have been done on children’s poetry, but the linguistic aspect of it is not common. However, literary studies will not be able to fully account for all the use of linguistic elements in this poetry that led to its meaning.

 Moreover, we found that, more often than not, adult poems and other genres of children’s literature are written, explored and researched into, but just a little is said of children’s poetry. Ironically, children need poems even more than adults. Reading, reciting, and memorising of poems will help a child begin a life of reflection very early in life. Advantages abound: their words will be coordinated, their imaginative ability stimulated, their sensitivity and perceptive powers to be responsive to society, and their ability to understand poems later in life improved.

      My choice of children’s poetry stems from the fact that it is as if children’s poet

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