An African Elegy (Style)

Style

Symbol

“An African Elegy” uses symbolic imagery to carry the emotional weight of the poem. Some of Duncan’s primary symbols include the Congo, Africa and African nature, African Negroes, blood, and dogs. These images represent a complex of ideas including the unconscious elements of human desire, the ubiquity and reality of death, and the tenuousness of human identity and of life. In the West, Africa has often been used by writers as a symbol of human beings’ baser instincts and desires. Joseph Conrad’s novel Heart of Darkness, which presents the Congo as a place of violence, ignorance, and barbarity, is one such example. Many of Duncan’s images, however, are obscure and sometimes inaccessible to beginning readers of poetry. He attempts to use them as pointers to a deeper, more complex reality than that which human beings experience. That reality can only be expressed in images.

Diction/Tone

Although the poem is called an elegy, its tone shifts between celebration and lament, sometimes approaching a kind of self-destructive ecstasy. The first stanza prepares the reader for this vacillation as it begins with the statement, “No greater marvelous / know I than the mind’s / natural jungle,” and then shifts to a description of the ominous nature of Death’s sounds. Duncan’s archaic spelling, sometimes using t instead of -ed endings for the past tense (e.g., “stopt” instead of “stopped”), his inversion of subjects and verbs, and his exotic word choice give his poem a formal and often magical tone.