33 pages • 1 hour read
Derek WalcottA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Throughout the poem, multiple allusions to the dichotomy between the natural world and a more developed, “civilized” world present a complex tension for the speaker to explore. While the Kikuyu are a part of the landscape, attached to it by blood, the British colonizers use “statistics to justify and scholars seize” (Line 7), which presents the British as far away mathematicians and economists studying out of some book, making decisions that will determine the course of other people’s lives. The significance of the colonizers considering this untouched land a “paradise” (Line 4) prompts questions as to why then they would need to impose their so-called civilized way of living on to an already civilized, almost heaven-like place.
The most crucial way the poem interrogates this dichotomy is by addressing the glaring similarities between nature’s brutality and the brutality and violence of war:
The violence of beast on beast is read
As natural law, but upright man
seeks his divinity by inflicting pain (Lines 15-17).
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