An African Elegy (Poem Summary)

Poem Summary

Stanza 1

Elegies are poems written to lament someone’s death. In “An African Elegy” death isn’t literal but figurative. The speaker is lamenting the death of a part of himself. The opening stanza creates a symbolic landscape full of exotic African creatures such as wildebeests, zebras, elephants, and okapi, a giraffe-like animal found in the Congo. Swahili are part of the Bantu peoples of eastern and central Africa. Duncan makes an explicit connection between the “marvelous” jungle in which the animals live and the “mind’s / natural jungle.” “Marvelous” primarily has a positive meaning here, but it picks up less benign associations as the poem develops. The preparation and hunting rituals engaged in by the Congolese men and women create a strange and ominous atmosphere in which death is omnipresent.

Stanza 2

Developing the image of death with which he ends the first stanza, Duncan personifies death here as “the dog-headed man zebra striped / and surrounded by silence who walks like a lion, / who is black.” This image might also be a literal description of one of the hunters. Duncan uses dog imagery throughout the poem, often to suggest contradictory ideas. Like dogs, death variously appears as a loyal companion, a guide, and a frightening presence. The speaker associates this image of death with British writer Virginia Woolf, who drowned herself in the River Ouse. Death calls Woolf back to the river to drown herself. Woolf suffered from depression and battled emotional demons throughout her life. The images the speaker uses to describe Woolf’s journey toward death are dream-like, spectral, and enigmatic. The speaker empathizes with Woolf’s emotional torment. Toward the end of the stanza, he compares her to Ophelia, a character from Shakespeare’s play Hamlet, who, emotionally unbalanced, commits suicide by drowning. These two figures become symbolic representations for all of humanity, whose “tortures” the speaker sees “absolved in the fog, / dispersed in Death’s forests, forgotten.” Here death is seen as a rescuer, a primal and natural part of the world into which all must eventually journey. Note that Woolf is a variant of wolf, an animal closely associated with the dog.

Stanza 3

In the previous stanzas, the speaker describes what he sees and hears. In this stanza, he announces his desire: “I am waiting this winter for the more complete black-out.” This image and the ones that follow are symbolic, that is images that arise from the speaker’s subconscious. Symbolic imagery does not have a one-to-one correlation to things or ideas outside of itself; rather symbols open up a realm of association, which can either be private (known only to the poet) or public (familiar to the common reader). “Negro armies in the eucalyptus” is an obscure image but one which suggests the idea of waiting. Who, though, is the “us” to whom the speaker refers? If the poem is read as a statement on homosexuality, as at least one reader has interpreted it, it might refer to the gay community itself, which has been persecuted and ostracized. Another possibility for the “us” is all the people who have suffered like the speaker himself, people of similar sensibilities, for example, Virginia Woolf. The third possibility is that the “us” is universal as in all humanity. Again the image of dogs, figured as “hounds,” appears. This stanza suggests a contradiction in the speaker’s desire. He wants “hounds / women and birds to go back to their forests and leave us / our solitude.” Yet those very images, associated with death, are the ones that can “absolve tortures.”

Stanza 4

This stanza describes a ritual in which Negro princes drink the blood of the speaker from cups made of rhinoceros bone and then, using magic, “tie and twist [him] like a rope.” This stanza echoes lines from Spanish poet Frederico Garcia Lorca’s poem “El Rey de Harlem.” Duncan himself has noted that this scene describes a sado-masochistic ritual in which the speaker casts himself in the role of victim. The speaker describes himself and others as “Kings” (“as giant Kings we gathered / and devourd her burning hands and feet”) possibly transformed through the smoking of marijuana, a plant with psychoactive chemicals. He then invokes the names of both “moonbar” and “clarinet” as talismans, that is, objects that hold magical powers. Duncan was well versed in the occult and the practice of magic and alchemy, and he frequently uses images from those fields in his poetry. Moonbar is a pearly white, opaque gemstone, usually pale blue with green and gold mottling, and considered a magic stone. Duncan repeats the image of burning hands and feet later in the stanza, foreshadowing his reference to Orpheus, son of Apollo and the muse Calliope, who was dismembered by the Maenads, a group of women who worshipped Dionysius. The last three lines highlight the symbolic nature of the ritual itself. The speaker is saying that what goes on inside of him, the “dark continent of my breast,” is as strange and tormenting as the scene just described.

Stanza 5

This stanza refers to the process of dying and death. “The rustling electric” is life itself, the energy that constitutes the animate world. Desdemona is the wife of Othello, a black African (Moor) in Shakespeare’s Othello. Her figure holds some significance for the speaker, as she too is a victim. She is murdered by her husband in a jealous rage when he suspects her of having an affair with his best friend. That she “wails within our bodies” further underscores the idea of victimization implicit throughout the poem. However, that she both “warns / against this towering Moor of self” and “laments her passing from him” seems to imply that she, and, by implication, the speaker, and possibly all of humanity are never simply victims but somehow always complicitous in whatever happens to them. Human beings are always both victims and victimizers. “Catches” is a word that Duncan has used in other poems. It has multiple meanings. On the one hand, it can mean the thing that is caught, as in a net of “catches”; on the other hand, it can mean being caught (i.e., what “catches” one).

Stanza 6

In this stanza the speaker’s sense of self dissipates into others. The images of the negroes and the rhinoceros-bone cups again appear. Duncan makes the symbolism more explicit in this stanza, as he compares the “halls / of blood that I call forests” to “the dark / and shining caverns where / beats heart and pulses brain, / in jungles of my body.” The figure of Othello, here “striped black and white” represents the complexity of the speaker’s desire. Othello was largely a good man who gave in to his jealousy and rage. The repetition of the pronoun “I” highlights the ecstatic pitch of the speaker’s emotion. Disembodied, he witnesses himself “as black as Orpheus,” possibly a reference to Orphé noire, a French film which retells the story of Orpheus. The speaker’s identification with Orpheus makes sense when the reader understands that Orpheus was the son of Calliope, one of the nine muses, and was revered for his music and verse. It is said that Orpheus had the ability to tame wild animals with his music.

Stanza 7

In this stanza, the speaker makes peace with Death. The image of the hound appears again, this time signifying an emotional release of sorts for the speaker. The souls of the dead now appear out of “all of the empty,” a kind of limbo. Other images in this stanza symbolize the relentlessness of desire “that never filld pocket,” and the incessant nature of being, “seeing nowhere / the final sleep,” the inability to die.

Stanza 8

This stanza universalizes the speaker’s vision. “The halls of Africa,” for Duncan, symbolically representative of the zone of “the marvelous,” is a place both desired and feared. These final images speak to the impossibility of love, as “seas / disturbd turn back upon their tides / into the rooms deserted at the roots of love.” The first sentence of the fifth line makes literal what was figurative in the image of the “bird-faced children crawl[ing] out of their fathers” in the preceding stanza; “There is no end.” The final image of the “tired sirens / com[ing] up from the water not to be touchd” both describes and emphasizes the complex nature of human desire.

Media Adaptations

• Modern American Poetry sponsors a Robert Duncan web site at http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/a_f/duncan/duncan.htm (last accessed April 2001).
• Kent State University lists a bibliography of Duncan’s work in its special collection at http://www.library.kent.edu/speccoll/literature/poetry/duncan.html (last accessed April 2001).
• The Theosophical University Press has a glossary of theosophical terms available online at http://www.theosociety.org/pasadena/etgloss/mi-mo.htm (last accessed April 2001).
• The American Academy of Poets offers a 1969 audiocassette of Duncan reading from The Opening of the Field, Roots and Branches, and Bending the Bow.