POETRY SUMMARIES
ENG 2603
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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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, ENG2603 POETRY SUMMARIES COMPILED BY JULES
The second stanza illustrates the care that the mother shows for her child: she is
looking for ticks and lice on him, which emphasises the poor conditions in which
they are forced to live.
In stanza three, four and five the poet goes on to give his impression of the
relationship and feeling between mother and the child in more than a merely
physical sense. The child is ‘grunting’ as he feeds, that is he is feeding greedily and
expressing his simple but deep satisfaction. Not only does he take in physical
nourishment, however, for during this process of feeding, her own deep feelings
‘ripple’ and are conveyed little by little into his frail, infantile nerves.
The poem admirably suggests the strong intimate mother-and- child relationship
developed by breast-feeding (often, of course, lost or destroyed in more ‘advanced’
cultures). The word ‘languours’ is important. It tells us that the girl appears rather
weary, unenthusiastic, and hopeless, as though expressing a deep despair and
resentment against the whole situation in which she finds herself.
Nevertheless, even in her mood of hopelessness, her motherhood and the latent
satisfaction she has in feeding her child, seem to arouse in her a kind of pride, ‘the
old unquenched, unsmotherable heat’: a feeling perhaps that her life has some
value, that she is taking part in an important life process; that she is not alone and
abandoned; she belongs to an old enduring tradition of human struggle and
survival; her ‘tribes’ though ‘curbed’ and ‘beaten’ for the time being, ‘have a dignity’
in their ‘defeat’; and still retain their self-respect, and are ready to ‘rise again’.
As the poem develops, we seem to move gradually closer to the mother, until in the
final stanza we are looking up at her, almost as though thorough the eyes of the
child himself; and she appears as an impressive, statuesque figure, shielding and
protecting her helpless infant. In the two last lines of all, after being compared to a
‘hill’, she is likened to a great storm cloud which “bears the coming harvest in its
breast”.
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