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Yusef Komunyaaka’s poem “Lime” combines detailed descriptions with timeless themes, elevating the poem to the level of philosophical poetry. The plot of the poem is about the army entering the city and completely transforming it. In the city, the order of laws and ideas is changing, which is definitely more than just a plot description with a higher meaning. The poem “Lime” is a statement about a cultural paradigm shift and the violent path it can take.
The poem “Lime” raises the themes of war and the conquest of territories, considering them from an aesthetic, detached perspective of artistic description. The army, which is described in the poem as victorious, is most likely called such in an allegorical ironic vein since it drags a detachment of subdued women turned into harem servants. Thus, it becomes clear to the reader that the victory of the army is associated with its cruelty and the fact that the soldiers embody brutal masculinity with its ruthlessness and humiliation of people of the opposite sex of the race or state. It seems that women sleeping with the enemy on the frontier of battle symbolize the paradox of war and the perversion of thinking that it brings, as love intersects with its opposite and becomes an oxymoron.
“Stunned morning” is an extremely remarkable epithet, as it is interpreted through the noise and roar of war, making the described morning like shell shock. This is emphasized by the further inversion of the “cloud of hooves and drums”, where the sequence of appearance of images is reversed while emphasizing the simultaneity of sound, visuals, and direct shaking of the earth by the army that entered the city. The change of dogmas and doctrines is described, where some priests demolish the sacred monuments of the previous ones, which demonstrates some cyclicity in the ongoing change of authority. The city thus begins to acquire a metaphysical quality, becoming a metaphor for the eternal history of the capture and remaking of various territories, where the symbolic signs of ownership are replaced.
The ruined statues in the forest symbolize the idols of the past that are being thrown into the dustbin of history – this paradigm shift is also demonstrated in the third stanza, where “Greek is reforged into Romance.” The very image of how the priests “cradle stone tablets” symbolizes the newness that appeared in the city along with the army a religion that is implanted and literally nurtured like a child by the priests. On stone slabs, obviously, new commandments are forged, that is, new rules by which the inhabitants of the city must live. At the same time, the last stanza of the poem shows the barbaric cruelty of the new order that has come since lime is likened to marble in indifference to beauty. Marble is burned because “someone dreams of a dome bathhouse.” These last lines express the simple and greedy intentions of the invaders, who are actually destroying the sacred beauty for the sake of basic needs as if they were burning great paintings to keep warm.
The poem demonstrates the cruelty and indifference of the colonial troops to the people they conquer, even if they hide behind good goals. The overthrow of the idols of other civilizations and peoples and the planting of one’s own culture is shown at the level of some eternal historical situation in the poem “Lime”. The theme of history and the change of cultures is shown extremely poetically; however, it touches upon the gloomy theme of human cruelty and the enslavement of people by people as a feature of the historical process.
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