An African Elegy (Criticism)

Contents: Introduction Author Biography Poem Summary Themes Style Historical Context Critical Overview Sources For Further Study

Criticism

What Do I Read Next?

• Robert Bertholf edited a collection of thirty-five letters between Duncan and the poet H. D. in 1991, titled A Great Admiration: H. D. / Robert Duncan Correspondence 1950 – 1961. Duncan and H. D. admired each other’s poetry intensely.
• Ekbert Faas’ biography of Duncan, Young Robert Duncan: Portrait of the Poet As Homosexual in Society, provides a detailed biography of the poet through 1950.
• Black Sparrow Press published Robert J. Bert-holf’s Robert Duncan: A Descriptive Bibliography in 1986. The book is difficult to obtain but contains an exhaustive and useful collection of secondary sources on Duncan.
• Critics generally agree that Duncan’s 1960 collection The Opening of the Field begins the poet’s mature phase of work. This collection contains what is perhaps Duncan’s best-known poem, “Often I Am Permitted to Return to a Meadow.”
• Ian Reid and Robert Bertholf edited a collection of essays and tributes to Duncan in 1979. Robert Duncan: Scales of the Marvelous contains essays by Denise Levertov, Michael Davidson, Thom Gunn, and Don Byrd.
• Duncan was a fierce and outspoken opponent to the war in Vietnam. James Mersmann’s 1974 Out of the Vietnam Vortex: A Study of Poets and Poetry examines Duncan’s poetry and life in light of the poet’s commitment to the idea of community.
• Sherman Paul’s The Lost America of Love: Rereading Robert Creely, Edward Dorn, and Robert Duncan, published in 1981, is a diary of sorts detailing Paul’s close reading of these important poets’ work.
• Cary Nelson’s Our Last First Poets: Vision and History in Contemporary American Poetry (1981) examines the relationship between history and poetics in a few of Duncan’s poems. Nelson is a leading Marxist literary critic.

soul); furthermore, it possesses a quality which . . . increases its dynamism and gives it a truly dramatic character. This quality, the essence of the symbol, is its ability to express simultaneously the various aspects (thesis and antithesis) of the idea it represents.

Symbols are both particular and general, then. They are a prism of an idea or theme, irreducible. Africa, as the figurative space for Duncan’s idea of the “marvelous” is, in effect, a symbolic topography of images, all of which contribute to this idea. The first stanza contains many of the symbolic images that will be repeated throughout the poem.

In the groves of Africa from their natural wonder
the wildebeest, zebra, the okapi, the elephant,
have entered the marvelous. No greater marvelous
know I than the mind’s
natural jungle. The wives of the Congo
distil their red and the husbands
hunt lion with spear and paint Death-spore
on their shields, wear his teeth, claws and hair
on ordinary occasions. There the Swahili
open his doors, let loose through the trees
the tides of Death’s sound and distil
from their leaves the terrible red. He
is the consort of dreams I have seen, heard
in the orchestral dark
like the barking of dogs.

The animal imagery here creates a strange and exotic landscape. Most American-born readers have probably never encountered any of these creatures except in a zoo or on television. Their appearance, then, indicates otherness and difference, a way of being unfamiliar to most readers. The speaker compares his own mind to this sense of strangeness. It too is other or strange to him, and this is exhilarating and frightening at the same time. The ritual of hunting preparation by Congolese men and women also contributes to this sense of the exotic; it underscores the presence and importance of death in their lives. Like the speaker later in the poem, the Congolese men inhabit the identity of another, “wear[ing] . . . [the lion’s] teeth, claws and hair / on ordinary occasions.” The idea of ordinariness resonates in the last animal image in the stanza, the barking of dogs. Dogs are domestic animals; they are also scavengers and hunters and known as being loyal. Associating dogs with death highlights the ordinariness of death in the lives of the other. The “terrible red” is another symbol of death’s many forms.

Duncan repeats the images introduced in the first stanza throughout the poem, letting them accrue meaning and power in much the same way a moonbar or magic stone (an image Duncan uses later) accrues power for its holder. The “barking of dogs” in the first stanza becomes “Death . . . the dog-headed man” in the second stanza. Hounds appear over and over again: white Afghan hounds, hounds in water, hounds of “great purity / disturbing the shadow and flesh of the jungle.” By repeating this image but altering it slightly and using it in a different context each time, Duncan imbues the image of the dog/hound with symbolic resonance. The dog is at once death itself, death’s companion, and a bewildering presence that requires a reassessment of its significance each time it appears.

The image of the “Negro” is also central to the poem. Duncan presents the image of Swahili men, Negro armies, Negro princes, Negro Kings, and Othello almost always as hunters or aggressors who act on him or others, often in a violent manner, making magic with his blood, twisting him like a rope. As symbolic images that inhabit the zone of the marvelous, these figures simultaneously inspire fear and awe. They function in the poem as markers of the speaker’s desire, as parts of himself just beginning to make themselves known to him through these images. In a letter to John Crowe Ransom, the editor of the magazine that initially accepted the poem for publication, Duncan attempts to explain the poem’s theme:

The theme of the unknown is seen variously; as the figure of Death, the unknown self . . . or as the darkness of repressed desires, the unknown content of the mind as it goes on. Negroes, Africa and the black of love are all symbols of subconscious forces. . . . The rising figures from the subconscious discovered in the poem then were Death, my lost self, and the lost love-object . . . projected in the mind as the images of the women distilling their red (the object feared and hated) and the image of Virginia Woolf (the object loved and desired).

This explanation is Duncan attempting to understand the poem after it was written. Duncan is not interested in intentionality in his poems. When he composes, images often appear. He doesn’t sit down and think about how he will use the image of the dog or the image of the African princes to mean something specific. For Duncan, the writing of poetry is itself a means of self-exploration, a therapy of sorts suited to figuring out his identity and desires, to probe the unknown self, as he has written, to “exercise my faculties at large.” His poems are often an expression of something he does not understand about himself or about the world as much as they are about what he does understand. In “Pages from a Notebook,” Duncan writes the following about his relationship to the composing process:

In one way or another to live in the swarm of human speech. This is not to seek perfection but to draw honey or poetry out of all things. After Freud, we are aware that unwittingly we achieve our form. It is, whatever our mastery, the inevitable use we make of the speech that betrays to ourselves and to our hunters (our readers) the spore of what we are becoming. I study what I write as I study out any mystery. A poem, mine or another’s, is an occult document, a body awaiting vivisection, analysis, x-rays.

It is interesting that the words “spore” and “hunter” appear in this journal entry, as they also appear in “An African Elegy.” As with “hunters,” readers can infer that both of these words function symbolically in Duncan’s universe. Hunting is an act of looking and thinking, of being prepared for what might appear. This description also fits Duncan’s work as a poet. Hunting is also a form of wanting or desiring an object. The object of desire in Duncan’s poem, though, is never made explicit. All the reader knows is that some thing is desired, and whatever it is, is never achieved. This idea is expressed in the poem’s final stanza when, for the first time, what the speaker is lamenting in this elegy becomes clear.

The halls of Africa we seek in dreams
as barriers of dream against the deep, and seas
disturbd turn back upon their tides
into the rooms deserted at the roots of love.
There is no end. And how sad then
is even the Congo. How the tired sirens
come up from the water, not to be toucht
but to lie on the rocks of the thunder. 
How sad then is even the marvelous!

Duncan laments that the idea of the exotic and the unknown — “The halls of Africa” — that human beings fantasize and dream about are neither truly exotic nor unknown because we already have ideas of them as such. The true unknown, Duncan suggests, is “the deep,” the part of the human soul that can never be described in symbolic imagery or metaphor, the part that transcends language itself. That human beings desire and go on desiring when there is no hope to fulfill that desire is the sad thing. The final image of the sirens, those beautiful mythological sea-nymphs whose ravishing songs caused men to drown themselves, underlines this, while also echoing the manner in which Ophelia and Virginia Woolf died.

When reading Duncan, try not to think about or to figure out what his images mean. Rather, try to inhabit the “marvelous” itself. Don’t cogitate. Let the images resonate, reverberate, becoming what they will. Receptive readers, even beginning readers of Duncan’s poems, will discover that their own minds can accommodate the exotic and strange as well. They’ll discover that the marvelous is the poem itself in the act of becoming, and that as readers they participate in that act.

Source: Chris Semansky, Critical Essay on “An African Elegy,” in Poetry for Students, The Gale Group, 2001.

“Don’t cogitate. Let the images resonate, reverberate, becoming what they will.”