Turning around, Roy Campbell's "Rounding the Cape"

Jeremv Cronin

Rounding the Cape

The low sun whitens on the flying squalls, Against the cliffs the long grey surge is rolled Where Adamastor from his marble halls Threatens the sons of Lusus as of old.

Faint on the glare uptowers the dauntless form, Into whose shade abysmal as we draw, Down on our decks, from far above the storm, Grin the stark ridges of his broken jaw.

Across his back, unheeded, we have broken Whole forests: heedless of the blood we've spilled, In thunder still his prophecies are spoken, In silence, by the centuries, fulfilled.

Farewell, terrific shade! though I go free Still of the powers of darkness art thou Lord: I watch the phantom sinking in the sea Of aU that I have hated or adored.

The prow glides smoothly on through seas quiescent: But where the last point sinks into the deep, The land lies dark beneath the rising crescent, And Night, the Negro, murmurs in his sleep.

The figure of Adamastor is at the root of all the subsequent white semiology invented to cope with the African experience. i

Without accepting Stephen Gray's archetypal approach, and allowing also for some hyperbole in the above quotation, it is possible to agree that the Adamastor figure has at least occupied an important place in literary endeavours to write and think about the southern African reality.

Eng/ish in Africa 11 No.1 (May 1984)

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Adamastor, a Cali ban-like personification of the Cape, was first used by Camoens in The Lusiads. and received an influential reworking in Roy Campbell's" Rounding the Cape", a poem included in his 1930 Adamastor collection. I shall be considering Campbell's poem with a view to assessing just how this figure of "white semiology" copes with the African experience. I hope to show that this poem is the site of a considerable inner struggle, a struggle that leaves its traces in a series of disjunctures that disrupt the careful symmetry upon which the poem itself is built.

Perhaps the most convenient point of entry into the structure of the poem is by way of considering the colour imagery and symbolism. Campbell often asserted the importance of the visual, the phanopoeiac, for his writing and thought, and his predilection for robust colour imagery has not escaped the critics.2 An inventory, in sequence, of words in this poem that either denote colours explicitly, or that have strong colour and tonal associations, provides the folIowing: 3

Stanza 1 whitens

gray 2 faint

shade 3 blood 4 shade

darkness 5 dark

Night Negro

There is, then, a carefully gradated progression from white through to black. This progression, corresponding at its most literal level to a chronological development, the sinking of the day, establishes a key opposition that organizes the poem: white/black. It is this colour contrast and progression that is used in the poem as vehicle to set up and think through another opposition of a social kind. This latter opposition is that between the ship and the personified Cape, between "we" ("sons of Lusus") and Adamastor, between "I" and "thou", between, in short, coloniser and colonised. Yet, if we consider the poem closely, the symmetry of this neat set of oppositions will be seen to be disrupted by a series of subversions. Subversion number one: Whose blood? Stanza three, the middle stanza, has something of a fulcrum character. It is

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in this stanza that the progression from white towards black reaches its mid­point in the strongly colour-suggestive word "blood". The two lines that precede stanza three are:

Down on our decks, from far above the storm, Grin the stark ridges of his broken jaw.

And then stanza three follows:

Across his back, unheeded, we have broken Whole forests: heedless of the blood we've spilled, In thunder still his prophecies are spoken, .... [my emphases]

Question: Whose blood?

Answer J: The repetition of the word "broken" suggests that it is Africa/ Adamastor that has been broken by "us", that the blood spilled is that of its colonised peoples. There is also, to reinforce this sense, a further, if subsidiary, suggestion of a colonial plundering of natural resources in the lines:

Across his back, unheeded, we have broken Whole forests ....

And, admittedly at an even more subsidiary level, we might hear in

A/cross his back, unheeded, we have broken

the suggestion of unheeded, but harsh attempts at conversion to Christianity. It is a suggestion that would link up, by contrast, with the "rising crescent", and "of darkness art thou Lord" in the fifth and fourth stanzas.

This, then, is one possible answer to the question I have posed. That I am not just fancifully constructing Answer 1 is confirmed by the reading of at least one critic. According to Heather Jurgens: "Campbell sees the jagged mountain ridges as part of Adamastor's body, maimed and horribJy disfigured by the European civilizers ... ".4 Answer 2: If, however, we relate stanza three to the Adamastor myth in The Lusiads in which the anthropomorphic Cape at once salutes the Portuguese for their daring in crossing' 'these forbidden limits of my own waters", and prophesies that a heavy toll will be exacted over the centuries for this daring, then another answer becomes apparent.s It is precisely in relation to The Lusiads that we must understand Campbell's stanza three references to "prophecies", "by the centuries, fulfilled". Once these references have been noted, and the earlier stanza one evocation of "us" as "the sons of Lusus" is remembered, then clearly it is the blood of the colonisers that is

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spilled. The breaking of "Whole forests" refers to the numberless shipwrecks that Adamastor has exacted.

It is this second answer that provides indeed the literal meaning of the stanza. In the progression of the stanza Answer 2 captures and censors Answer 1. A similar subversion can also be seen in the words "unheeded" and "heedless", which are related by similarity (both are negations of the same root) and contrasted syntactically.6 "We" are "unheeded", and ... but who is "heedless"? Once we have read stanza three right through, with due attention to the colon, then the answer must be that Adamastor is heedless of "our" suffering. Yet, as we read:

we have broken Whole forests: heedless of the blood we've spilled

the opposite sense (Le. it is "we" who are heedless, not Adamastor) is, of course, suggested.

What is at stake in this play of ambivalence? It is, to speak plainly, the very fact of colonial oppression. This stanza at its most literal level summarizes three and a half centuries of colonialism as so many years of suffering for the colonisers. A large omission. Yet, and th~s is the point of speaking about a subversion, it is an omission that is shadowed by the very thing it omits. What we catch in this ambivalence (in a highly compressed form) is an unresolved struggle, which in turn is related to a specific historical process. It is a struggle related to the beginnings of a crisis within colonial ideology; colonial discourse can no longer cast - which is to say: understand - its experiences in the same terms. The aspiration to epical grandeur, so evident in the Campbell poem, is no longer easily sustainable on the old terms. Notwithstanding the effective denial of colonial oppression, there is, then. simultaneously in this poem a certain allusive undermining, from within, of the colonial epic. It is a partial undermining of a tradition in which the suffering of the colonised peoples is simply ignored. Indeed, there is more than this half-concession, for in the sudden blur that descends (unheeded/heedless, and whose blood?) we might hear the possibilities of an identification between "we" and Adamastor, of a new sense of national unity, perhaps, in this land. But, as I have tried to show, these are merely rumours.

Denial, then, of colonial oppression shadowed by a half-admission: it is in the resonance of this cognitive subversion that many of the poem's fascinations and shortcomings lie.

Subversion number two: Passivity of tbe agent It may be objected that I am guilty of viewing matters in a one-sided

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fashion. After all, over three centuries of colonialism in Africa was not easily imposed by the colonisers. The process took centuries to complete (more or less), and at considerable cost in their own blood. The African peoples were victims of oppression, but not passive victims.

Here we encounter the second subversion in Campbell's poem. For it is the poem that suggests passivity in the African peoples, and at the very moment that it speaks of the colonisers' sufferings.

Returning to stanza three, it should be noted how Adamastor as an agent is displaced in a series of slippages. In the first place "the centuries" (not Adamastor) are made the explicit agent for the verb "[are] fulfilled". This passivity of Adamastor is enhanced by the word "silence", and, perhaps, by the paradoxical connotation that "silence" might suggest, retro-actively, to "thunder slil/". Thunder here in stanza three will also recall the line from stanza one:

Against the cliffs the long grey surge is rolled.

In his thunderous prophecies Adamastor is no more than a passive sounding board. At the syntactical level, the contrast between the active and passive verbs of stanza three should be noted. The stanza contains four verbs which are expressly linked and contrasted at the phonetic level by their rhyming:

we have broken we've spilled his prophecies are spoken [his prophecies are) fulfilled.

While the verbs associated with "we" as subject are active, those associated (if indirectly) with Adamastor are passive. Yet, as we have seen, it is supposed to be "we" who are suffering. At the moment that Adamastor's potency is most strongly asserted, it is also most subtly undermined.

At this point, an obvious objection to my argument will occur. Adamastor, it could be said, is portrayed passively because what we find here is an anthropomorphic conversion of something which is, in the first place, a geological entity (the Cape). In order to make his poem work 'empirically', and yet carry a more general human and social significance, Campbell has to vacillate between the geological particularity and the symbolic generality. The passive verbs in stanza three carry the vacillation - they are verbs (in particular "to speak") normally associated with human subjects, but they are placed in the passive in order to keep space open for Adamastor, as a geological entity.

I readily accept this explanation. Indeed this objection is useful rather than damaging to my argument. To adopt certain poetic means (in this case

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the use of an anthropomorphised African terrain) is never an innocent process. Different ways of proceeding carry different potential insights and inherent risks. I will have more to say about this in due course. For the moment let me merely summarise the point I am making in this section. Subversion number two: the colonised rendered passive; this passivity deriving in part from the specific poetic embodiment given to the colonised - Adamastor who is at once a mountain and a giant man.

To pursue the consideration of subversions within the poem I turn now to personal pronominal forms. Making an inventory of these forms (absolute and possessive pronouns), as they occur through the poem, provides the following:

Stanza 1 his 2 we

our his

3 his, we we his

4 I thou I I

5 his

The most interesting feature is the shift from we/he to the IIthou forms in stanza four. What is the significance of this shift? I would like first to consider the move from we to I.

Subversion number three: tbe loss of 'we' Besides marking a switch to a more conversational mode (but I shall consider this particular matter later), the singularisation of the first person plural tends to break the old solidarity of "we", a solidarity that links up with "the sons of Lusus". Until stanza four the "I" has suffered along with his fellow colonisers, now he alone seems to escape. The "I" in stanza four detaches itself from the "we" and goes "free" not just from Adamastor/ Africa/the colonised. The "I" alone begins to stand opposed to the "powers of darkness", which may now be taken to refer not only to 'black' Africa, but perhaps also to a backward, bigoted, 'white' Africa, from which Campbell dIssociates himself, if with torn feeling ("all that I have hated or adored"). 7

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The first two stanzas set up the material for an epic conflict which might, on one reading, be characterised as a coloniser/colonised conflict (the sons of Lusus versus Adamastor). Stanza three upholds this opposition, but subverts its historical significance in two ways (subversions one and two). The ambivalences of stanza three now make way for a further departure, the very subversion of this opposition between coloniser and colonised. It is now the "I" that begins to stand opposed to both coloniser and colonised. It is this shift, of course, that allows a mere individual flight to function as a 'solution' .

Yet there is another side to this separation of the "I" from "we". This shift opens up the small but vital distance between Campbell's poem and the colonial epic and broader colonial ideology that constitute its raw materials. It is this shift in authorial position that enables Campbell at the end of the poem to assert, in effect, that Africa belongs to the Africans, that colonialism is doomed to failure.

However, this shift occurs imperceptibly, as a slippage, a subversion of the poem's semantic symmetry. We are left with a vacillation in which we shift back and forth between the opposition of coloniser and colonised, and the conflation of coloniser and colonised. Guy Butler's brief comment on this poem in his introduction to A Book of South African Verse displays this exact vacillation:

Adamastor is the spirit of a barbarous continent resentful of any attempt to disturb its ancient ignorance and gl00m,8

i.e. Adamastor is the archetypal African as conceived of in colonial ideology.

It [Adam astor I had, in fact, just rejected both Campbell and Plomer in their spirited attempt in the pages of Voors!ag to introduce a little more sweetness and light into their homeland,9

i.e. 'Africa' is blamed for the sins of the colonisers, while these colonisers are invested with the characteristics that colonial ideology attributes to 'Africa'. Needless to say, in all this the question of colonialism in South African is not remotely thought through.

This, then, is what is at play in the shift from "we" to "I". But what of the other pronominal change, the move from "he" to "thou"? This switch matches the move to intimacy, to personalisation found in the switch from "we" to "I" - yet not in a strictly symmetrical fashion. This symmetry is impossible because "he" (or rather its possessive form "his") is already singular.

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Subversion number four: the colonised This asymmetry is the trace of another subverted reality, or rather, of the core reality subverted in all the previous subversions. We have already seen how stanza three, despite itself, speaks at the top of its voice about colonial oppression, when in fact it is only speaking about the suffering of the colonisers. We have seen, in the same stanza, how Adamastor, the apparent agent linked with the colonised peoples j is in fact rendered passive in this very activity. We have seen how in stanza four what seemed previously to be a coloniser/colonised opposition is watered down and subverted. To make all this clearer a diagram might be useful:

Subversion one colonisers II colonised (the sufferers!) (the inflictors of this

t . suffering!) ~---------~--------~I

SubVersion two .. 'Colonisers II colonised

t ' I (inflictors of ~uffering, but passive.') L __ ---__ 1 __ .:J

II colonisersl& colonised (undifferentiated) Subversion three • (displacement of the bar \.

of opposition)

In all these subversions what is implied, but left unsaid, is the very existence of the colonised peoples. The asymmetry (the "we" becomes "I", but "he" becomes "thou") is a trace of this censorship.

Stanza one opposes the "sons of Lusus" not with the sons of Adamastor, but with Adamastor himself. It is this asymmetry in number that the pronominal forms ("we", "his") pick up and perPetuate in stanzas two and three. Moreover, the ship is explicitly inhabited, but Adamastor is not. Adamastor's singularity may personify the colonised peoples, but it may equally personify some non-human, elemental force. The reality of the colonised peoples is further subverted in stanza four where Adamastor, the possible, but not certain, locus for their personification, is degraded into a mere "shade", a sinking "phantom" , which, of course, contradicts all that the poem has hitherto invested in the Cape (solidity, permanence).

But, if the colonised peoples are so absent from the poem, is this not just an absence? What entitles me to speak of a full-scale subversion? Or, to put the same objection in another form, is this talk of subversion, of coloniser and colonised, not to import from outside of the poem certain (political) assumptions with little relevance to the poem?

Let it be said that indeed this reading is informed, like any reading, by a

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viewpoint. Also, this viewpoint does not, I would think, coincide with Campbell's. Yet Campbell at this point in his life was preoccupied - to a degree, and in however confused a fashion - with the feeling that the African people would sooner or later throw off their oppression. We have, for instance, the evidence of other poems in the Adamastor collection, "The Serf" and "The Zulu Girl". These poems pose this problem in their own ways, with, I think, their own complexities. But we do not have to leave "Rounding the Cape", for within this poem itself the absence of the colonised peoples is not a mere absence. It is a clamorous absence felt in the White/black polarity of the poem, in the presence-absence of colonial oppression, in the strange active passivity of Adamastor in the third stanza.

This, however, is not all. The colonised peoples, so long unmentioned, are indeed finally uttered by the poem itself, in its last line, with the word "Negro". This naming (but of course the last line is not just this naming) closes the poem, and offers, like any classical ending, a kind of resolution. The Hermeneutic Resolutions belong, to borrow Roland Barthes' terminology, to the "hermeneutic code" of a text. lO This 'code' is that in which enigmas are suggested, formulated, held in suspense, and finally disclosed. This dilatory strategy establishes the lure of reading, it leads on, teases, misleads and, finally, according to convention, offers a resolution. A suspense thriller manifests the code in its most blatant, if banal, form.

Can we talk of a hermeneutic strategy at work in a poem like "Rounding the Cape"? I think so; and, in the first place, it should be noted how the poem makes use of devices that would normally be associated with a conventional epic, or narrative novel plot, in setting up the strategy.

The first three stanzas promise us a showdown, some epic struggle. Adamastor threatens as of old, his broken jaw grins ominously down over "us". Yet this showdown never really materialises, and in stanza four suddenly the poet is already saying goodbye.

Farewell, terrific shade!

Is everything over? No, for the qualifying "though" that follows

though I go free

holds us in some suspense.

Still of the powers of darkness art thou Lord:

Adamastor's threats remain, but what are these threats? Do they refer just to his shipwrecking propensities? On the contrary, the next lines seem to

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say, Adamastor it is that sinks while

The prow glides on through seas quiescent ....

A new repose, at once undermined by the "But" that follows. But what? Again there is more stalling and a feint:

Where the last point sinks into the deep ....

So what is ominous about Adamastor after all? What lies behind the threats?

The whole poem is headed for bathos, then the last two lines provide something of a resolution.

It should be stressed, however, that this naming ("Negro"), while it brings closure and disclosure at the level of suspense, does not unravel the preceding cognitive subversioIl$. The White/black, coloniser / colonised opposition, which l have used to highlight the existence of these subversions, was set up in the first place with this foregrounded naming in the final line already on the table. It is precisely when we re-read the poem in the light of the final line that the full and symptomatic resonance of the cognitive subversions is felt.

\. From epic to lyric . Appearing soon after Campbell's final departure from South Africa in December, 1926, following the disappointment of the Voorslag project,ll "Rounding the Cape" can be, and has been, read as the poet's valedictory gesture to his homeland. If we compare this poem with the corresponding event as described in Camoens' The Lusiads, the first and most significant 'empirical' difference to be noted is that in Campbell's poem the Cape is now rounded (it is fair to presume) going the other way. Just as the Adamastor scene in The Lusiads is made to presage the opening of a new colonial epoch, so this return to Europe in the early twentieth century could be seen to presage the beginning of the end of the same epoch.

But, of course, it is not just an 'empirical' change of direction that we find in a comparison of the poems. The extended epic of Camoens is an altogether different entity from Campbell's short, more lyrical poem. Nevertheless, Campbell's poem abounds in elements of a traditional epic -not least in the diction, much of it borrowed explicitly from Camoens: Adamastor, threats, sons of Lusus, shipwreck, Night, Negro, not to mention the very notion of an epic trial in the rounding of some nautical obstacle like a Cape. Yet this material amounts, in fact, to a flirtation with the epic genre. The first two stanzas could well be elements of an epic, and seem to promise such a genre. Not that, given the manifest brevity of the

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poem, the reader will really anticipate an epic. In any event the epic promises are not fulfilled.

Part of the problem of writing an epic on this topic, that is, of attempting to cognise the encounter with Africa in this manner, in the 1920s, as opposed to the 16th century, is that sailing around the Cape, in itself, no longer presents epic possibilities. For the 15th and 16th century Portuguese it was an act of physical courage. In the Adamastor episode of The Lusiads the epic contest is first and foremost the struggle between the voyagers and nature, embodied here by Adamastor. This is not to say that social conflicts are entirely absent from The Lusiads in Canto V. The Adamastor episode is immediately preceded by a hostile encounter with Khoi or San tribesmen; and Adamastor himself is invested partly with Khoisan features. 12 Moreover, not all Adamastor's threats are of an elemental character; he predicts the death of "the first illustrious viceroy in India, D. Francisco de A1meida", who was killed by the Khoi in Table Bay - the epic was written after this event, but set at a time before it. Adamastor even adds: "This vengeance will not be mine alone, for his [i.e. de Almeida's1 destruction of Kilwa and Mombasa will cry out for retribution". Nevertheless, Camoens' poem is essentially what Campbell's cannot be - a nautical epic.

Unable to develop the confrontation along physical lines (for historical reasons), and unwilling to develop it on social lines (for reasons of his own) the epic possibilities inevitably evaporate. The quasi-epic parts of Campbell's poem quickly come to be overlaid with another perspective in which we move to an exhortation and an exorcism. In other words, there is a dual movement that will at once take us towards an addressee (the second person "thou", characteristically associated with the conative),13 and towards an addresser (the "I", focal point of the lyric).J4 This switch, as we know, occurs in the fourth stanza, which is marked by an exhortation ("Farewell ... "), the occurrence of "thou", and a unique triple occurrence of "I". Indeed, this stanza imposes a shift in perspective that compels a re-reading of the entire poem. Consider the line:

I watch the phantom sinking in the sea ....

The irruption of this line abruptly informs us that everything that has so far happened has merely been from the phenomenal or emotive viewpoint of the 'I'. The uptowering of Adamastor was not the consequence of Adamastor actualJy standing up, but an apparent effect of the ship/well drawing closer. As the ship draws away Adamastor must perforce sink. "I", "watch", "phantom", and "sinking" are, then, four elements that

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are closely interlinked. Adamastor, in sinking from the viewpoint of the watching I, reveals himself to be no more than a phantom, an imaginary figment.

In the classical epic Adamastor would actually stand up, or, as in The Lusiads, step out as a real, material force, and he would actually talk:

Cum torn de voz nos fala horrendo e grosso, Que pareceu sair do mar profundo1s

(In a deep and horrifying voice, he spoke as iJfrom the depths of underwater).

This as iJis the trace of the real world on the 'real' of the epic. In the lyric this relation of 'as if' is exactly inverted, for here the sea thunders 'as if' with the voice of Adamastor. The epic says: Adamastor's voice was so deep and terrifying it seemed like the sea itself. The lyric says: In the thundering of the sea it seemed like Adamastor was speaking.

Stanza four of the Campbell poem relativises and undermines, then, one particular poetic strategy for dealing with reality. Aft~r our possible expectations of an epic confrontation are frustrated in stanza three, a new climactic point is created, by displacement, in the fourth stanza, a stanza that works a magical transformation. The "we" becomes "I", and the third person is transformed into a second person ("thou"), the addressee of a conative message ("Farewell ... "). This double transformation is essential for the poem to carry the new function now consigned to it. Only by transforming the we-he encounter into something much more intimate (I-thou), only by allowing Adamastor to approach so close as to be almost touching, can the poet, in an act of exorcism, get Adamastor to bear off from the poet's very interiority, "all that I have hated or adored". This exorcism is performed in the fourth stanza, and in the fifth stanza the Cape/Night/Negro can be returned to distance and the third person.

It is, in fact, this act of exorcism that comes to lie, by displacement, at the centre of the poem. We have already noted to what extent real problems are sidelined for this exorcism to be able to occur in the first place (see particularly subversion three).

It is, I think, significant that Campbell in the last line of this fourth stanza should use the disjunctive "or" (it could be read as either an exclusive or inclusive disjunctive). If he had, instead, written:

Of all that I have hated and adored

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he would perhaps have set in motion an inquiry that was more interesting. In poetry, unlike formal logic, contradiction is often cognitively fruitful, since, when found in the context of a poem, it tends to be read as paradox. Which is to say, further significance will.be sought for it. Had Campbell pursued this track more substantially he would have underlined that the poetic I's feelings were divided, and possibly that the object of these feelings (Adamastor) required some internal differentiation. I do not deny that these things are partly suggested by Campbell's last line in the fourth stanza, but the force with which they are asserted is considerably dampened by the use of the disjunctive. It is not surprising however, since it is precisely this kind of differentiation, as I have already argued (see subversion three, the shift from "we" to "I"), that is being obfuscated in this stanza. Consequently, the further detailing, or analysing, of these emotions, and particularly any detailing of their respective objects, remains blocked.

The shift from "we" to "I" coincides with a formal shift into a more thoroughly lyrical mode. But the lyrical, too, bumps up against the same difficulty encountered in the early stanzas, but in a form appropriate to it. Campbell does not really explore the emotions of his lyrical-I.

In the fifth stanza we return to the ambience of an epic, but an 'epic' whose terms have been considerably undermined. The poem carries its sleight of hand ("The prow glides smoothly on ... "), and resurrects the physical Adamastor, only to consign him to darkness, and substitute the vague identification of "Night" and "Negro". Now, however, that the quasi-epic has been relativised by the lyric (blocked as it is itself), this "Negro" has at least the advantage of being a terror to the philistines and a manipulable construct for the poet.

It is precisely in the light of this that we should consider the continued reverberation of this poem (and others like it) within contemporary white EngJish-Ianguage literature in South Africa. The so-called 'poetry of dread', the continued evocation of dark forces stirring away in the night, of the imminent arrival of the 'barbarians' - these omnipresent themes and images, which so often pass themselves off as progressive, need to be considered very carefully. Too often some dark, elemental Adamastor is wheeled in as an ex machina solution for the white writer's own personal frustrations with a suburban, 'philistine', white South Africa, or even as a masochistic purgative for the guilts and ambivalences that the white writer feels in South Africa. To call a plague down upon one's own house is certainly a step forward from the mere bravado and triumphalist assumptions of much racist discourse. But to reduce, in effect, decades of organised resistance by the majority of South Africans against their racial

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oppression into some primeval (albeit welcomed) cataclysmic force is not really to escape from the broader assumptions of colonialism.

Campbell's "Rounding the Cape" celebrates an individual 'revolt', which seeks its reasons and justifications in a flirtation with different genres and in a vertiginous play of subversions. This 'revolt' finds its solution in individual flight, and, like so much contemporary white English-language literature in South Africa, a delight in leaving behind it a certain dark threat.

NOTES I. Stephen Gray, Southern African Literature: An Introduction (Cape Town: David Philip,

1979), p.27. 2. For observations on this aspect of Campbell's poetry see, inter alia, Roy Campbell,

Broken Record (London: Boriswood, 1934), p.205; Alan Paton, "Roy Campbell: Poet and Man", Theoria, 9 (1957), pp.19-21; Uys Krige, "Roy Campbell as Lyrical Poet", English Studies in Africa (Sept. 1958), p.84-5; Heather L. Jurgens, "Behind the Poetry of Roy Campbell", Lantern (June 1965), p.35; D.R. Beeton, "Roy Campbell", UNISA English Studies, 10, 3 (1972), p.44; and John Povey, Roy Campbell (Boston: Twayne, 1977), p.46.

3. I concede that my list will be somewhat arbitrary. Do "marble", "sun", "forests", and "crescent", for instance, not have colour associations? They possibly do, although less strong in the context than, for example, "blood" and "Negro". However, their inclusion would hardly disturb the pattern I wish to highlight.

4. Jurgens, op.cit. p.26. " 5. Luis de Camoens, Os Lusiades (London: Oxford University Press, 1973), Canto V.

Campbell first read The Lusiads in May 1926 in Mickle's verse translation: see Peter Alexander, Roy Campbell: A Critical Biography (Cape Town: David Philip, 1982), p.74.

6. Technically, this is what Jakobson calls a Grammatical Figure of the morphological kind - see Roman Jakobson, "Concluding Statement: Linguistics and Poetics", in T.Sebeok (ed.), Style in Language (Cambridge, Mass. : MIT Press, 1960), p.375.

7. This is not mere speculation. If we bear in mind much of Campbell's other writing from the period, it is clear that he sees his departure from South Africa as an escape basically from a provincial, narrowminded, white South Africa. The poem "Tristan da Cunha" (also in the Adamastor collection) has the following pertinent lines:

Exiled like you [Le. the islandl and severed from my race By the cold ocean of my own disdain, ....

In his prose writing from the same period a similar attitude emerges. See his attack on the 'ideal' of a 'White South Africa' and on the 'colour bar' in Voorslag, 2 (July 1926), under the nom de plume Lewis Marston.

8. Guy Butler (ed.), Introduction, A Book of South African Verse (London: Oxford University Press, 1959), p.xxix.

9. Ibid. 10. Roland Barthes, S/Z (London: Jonathan Cape, 1975), pp.18-20, and pp. 54-6. II. See Peter Alexander, "Campbell, Plomer, van der Post and Voorslag". English in

Africa, 7,2 (1980). 12. Adamastor is portrayed as having a clayey pallor, and his hair is matted with mud (a Khoi

practice). See The Lusiads, Canto V. 39: ... e a cor terrena e pAlide Cheios de terra e crespos os cabelos.

13. See Jakobson. op. cit. 14. Ibid. 15. The Lusiads, Canto V, 40.

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