Contains Latest Poetry analysis for exam preparation. Included are the following 12 South African poems
1. The Zulu Girl by Roy Campbell
2. Ntsikana kaGabha - “Ntsikana’s Bell
3. “A Red Blanket Addresses Christians” by Nontsizi Mgqwetho
4. The Slave Dealer – Thomas Pringle
5. TO W...
Poetry Summaries
1. The Zulu Girl by Roy Campbell:
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,ENG2603 POETRY SUMMARIES COMPILED BY JULES
1. The Zulu Girl by Roy Campbell:
Introduction
The Zulu Girl by Roy Campbell focuses on the pitiable plight of African people who are
under domination and exploitation of European Civilization. It evokes the context of one
particular African tribe that is "Zulu".
This poem ventures to disclose a terrible plight of a South African tribal woman whose life
is spent in poverty and labour. The speaker catches a sight of a girl working in a field in
blistering heat, yet looking after other responsibility of nurturing children. He closely
examines the activities of the poor, deprived girl and her hungry son and describes them
meticulously so as to display a vivid picture of a pathetic yet glorious sight of a woman.
It develops the image of breastfeeding by comparing it with the flow of a stream and then a
river into the child’s body; the mother’s image looks like a mountain, and then a cloud to
the child. At the end the poet states explicitly that the energy thus transmitted will soon
convert itself into a rainy and fertile of a new future for the tribe. It is a revolutionary poem
that takes an ordinary situation of a young mother breastfeeding her child to meditate the
suppressed energy of the African people, which the poet thinks will inevitably bring about a
revolution.
The Zulu Girl by Roy Campbell: Critical Analysis
Theme
The poem Zulu Girl is a powerful yet pathetic recreation of the hardship and endurance of
the South African people. Roy Campbell makes the masculinist equation i.e. male is
equals to culture and female is equals to nature. It poses an immediate problem of how
miserably the poor South African people are forced to work on the farm. The poem is
powerful both in sound and in effect.
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, ENG2603 POETRY SUMMARIES COMPILED BY JULES
Content
On the surface, this poem is simply an observation of a Zulu woman feeding her
child. Upon closer consideration, however, it becomes clear that the poem is about
oppression, specifically of women.
The poem has a four line stanza. The speaker provides us a detail of the plight of
the Zulu girl. The observation made by the speaker is minute and influential.
The first stanza gives a description of a hot landscape where the labourers work.
It is during the daytime that the sun sheds its hot rays on the ground -“the hot red
acres”. The farm seems to be under the powerful heat of the sun. It is so parching
that the hot red acres –African landscape-seem to be ready to burst into flames.
In the field is the “gang”. The word “gang” as of course frequently used in this
connection, suggests that its members have no individuality and identity, are treated
rather like prisoners, or are being made to undertake forced labour: certainly they
have no personal pride or pleasure in the work they are doing, and are actually
under some kind of the compulsion
Now the observation is focused on the girl who flings down her hoe which can be
seen as an act of defiance of authority, which exacts her subjection, a turning from
mass production to the responsibilities of reproduction. Then she unslings her child
from her shoulder. The child besides being “tormented by flies” is also in need of
nourishment, for the girl takes him to a patch of thin shade nearby to feed him at
her breast. While the child feeds, the girl passes her hand caressingly through his
hair. It is significant perhaps that the mother is referred to as a ‘girl’: this may
suggest that she is not a wife and belongs to the vast number of black South
Africans who have lost their traditional ways of life and have been caught up in the
chaos of the modern world.
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