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The zulu girl, VOCABULARY, On the surface, this poem is simply an…
The zulu girl
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 equal 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.
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The poem analysis
Stanza 1
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The word "gang" is frequently used in this connection, suggests that its members have no individuality and identity. They are treated like slaves or prisoners.
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
Stanza 4
In the fourth stanza, the underlying message becomes clear. The young child is a symbol of the might of the Zulu nation.
In him, there is an ‘old unquenched, unsmotherable heat’ (line 14) that refers back to the fierce warriors of the Zulu tribe.
The strength of the Zulu still exists in the Zulu people in spite of the oppression that they experience.
Stanza 2
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She is looking for ticks and lice on him, which emphasises the poor conditions in which they are forced to live in.
Stanza 3
In the third stanza, the women brestfeeds her child.
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If a child is viewed as a puppy , his mother is viewed as a dog.
The mother, however does not feel this way, she feels the overwhelming tenderness for her child.
Stanza 5
In the final stanza of the poem, the mother metaphorically becomes a hill that overshadows a whole village.
She is no longer just the mother of one child; she represents all the mother of all the children of oppressed people.
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This is a metaphor that suggests the children of the oppressed people will one day reap the harvest of their suffering; in other words, they will overcome their oppression with help from mothers like the ‘Zulu Girl’ in the poem.
Without appealing to our emotions are directly or blatantly (as a propagandist might have done) the writer arouses our sympathy for the Zulu Girl in the hardships of the existence; this leads on to an admiration for the endurance and for the strength of life that is seen in her.
This in its turn, through the concluding simile, leads to a kind of prophetic hint that the scene we have witnessed is not final, and that a different and better state of affairs is bound to come in the future.
We notice that this hope is not conveyed by plain, prose statement, as a matter of fact: it is glimpsed imaginatively by the poet’s intuition and conveyed in the form of this indirect suggestion.
This mind map has everything you need for an essay and if you read thoroughly you will be able to answer all questions based on The Zulu Girl poem
FORM AND STRUCTURE
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The first stanza uses a-b-a-b, the second c-d-c-d, and so on.
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SOUND DEVICES
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Sound is also employed to add riches to the image of the ‘grunting’ (line 10) child, the sound of the mother’s nails rustling through the child’s hair with onomatopoeic ‘clicks’ (line 8), and the personified ‘sighing’ (line 12) of the river as the mother’s milk passes to her child.
POETIC DEVICES
As mentioned in ‘Content’ the poet uses imagery, symbol, metaphor and diction to add meaning to the poem throughout.
The metaphor of ‘smoulder’ gives the impression that the land is almost too hot to bear and could almost burst into flames.
The simile in stanza three, which compares the child to a ‘puppy’ (line 10), implies an innocent, harmless and natural activity.
However, the ‘broad river’ (line 12) contains more than nutritional substance.
The reader is informed that this child is absorbing much more and the dash used at the end of line 14 tells us what this is.
In stanza three, we turn on different matters, but the choice of words is apt again.
An interesting point to notice in the first stanza is the way in which the rhythmic and rhyming pattern emphasizes the physical effort made by the girl when she takes the child from her back.
In stanza two, we read how the mother, in the meagre shade of the thorn trees, is searching the hair of her child for ticks – again a detail which suggests the poverty and unsanitary conditions under which these labourers live.
We notice that her sharp nails are ‘purpled with the blood” of the parasites. In fact, the phrase ‘purpled with the blood of ticks’ is grammatically out of place; it is intended presumably to relate to its head - word ‘nails’, but the nails are introduced by the conjunction ‘while’ and cannot strictly be governed by a loose phrase which lies outside the clause together.
Our attention is held by the metaphor ‘prowled’, which suggests that her fingers are like a fierce animal searching through the forest for its prey.
Not only does the metaphor give this impression but the sounds of the word sequence ‘ticks’, electric, clicks intensify it.
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The sharp electric clicks are produced when she finds a tick and cracks it between her fingernails: this produces a sound like that given by an electric spark.
more on poetic devices
To make the sudden change of thought from the reflective to the aggressive, there is a sudden change in the rhythmic and sound qualities of this stanza, and we come to a vigorous climax on the energetic multi-syllabic word ‘unsmotherable’. “Yet in that drowsy steam her flesh imbibes/ An old unquenched unsmotherable heat…”
The word ‘unsmotherable’ takes on special force in its context with ‘unquenched’, which seem to prepare the way, and the monosyllable ‘heat’ which gives the line its decisive conclusion. The line as a whole is an emphatic statement of the unquenchable vigour and spirit of the African people: nothing can blot out or obliterate their primal energy (heat – one of the basic essentials of life).
Stanza four arouses out increased attention with an unexpected switch of thought, almost a paradox. In the physical sense it is obviously the child which is drinking from its mother; in another sense we are now told that her flesh is, in a deeper sense, imbibing something from the drowsy stream.
The feeling of conviction is repeated in a slightly different rhythmic pattern in two following and closely parallel lines: “The curbed ferocity of beaten tribes/ The sullen dignity of tier defeat” when an element of alliteration ‘b’ and ‘d’ also adds to the forceful pattern of speech.
Then the poet goes on to describe the deep strong feelings which pass in a steady, inevitable flow from the mother to the child and here the simile of the broad river is very suitable.
The sequence of ugly vowel sounds suggest the greediness (and hunger) of the baby as he feeds, and this is intensified in the animal simile ‘like a puppy’, in which the same vowel sound appears.
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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.
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