From the poem the 'zulu girl' by roy Campbell
Briefly discuss the nature of imagery used in the poem?
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Answer:
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.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 labor: 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.
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 .
The poem now moves to its prophetic climax and the Zulu Girl, as we have seen, takes on the significance of a symbol.
“Zulu Girl” is thus an effective and meaningful short poem, in which many resources of the poet’s art have been combined to treat one of the urgent problems of the modern world.