Metaphors in The Lion and the Jewel by Wole Soyinka

Lakunle whines to Sidi, "my heart / Bursts into flowers with my love. / But you, you and the dead of this village / Trample it with the feet of ignorance" (6). He uses the metaphor of a flower blooming due to the power of his love, but then depicts that flower being trampled into oblivion by the callous village. It is an extreme metaphor and one that bespeaks Lakunle's hyperbolic tendencies. He depicts his heart as being delicate and fragile, which ironically is proven not to be the case: when he thinks he is to marry Sidi, the putative love of his life, he thinks it is too scary and too soon; then, he forgets her almost immediately by chasing after another village girl.

Baroka tells Sidi, "old wine thrives best / Within a new bottle" (54). This metaphor works on two levels. The first is the surface-level metaphor that Sidi is supposed to pick up: traditions and old ways of doing things will seem fuller and sweeter if they are housed and filtered within modernity and progress. However, the more debauched meaning that Baroka amuses himself with is that he will pour his old wine—his semen—into her new body, and thus create a child. Old men do well with young women, he thinks.