Analysis of Tarzan’s ‘Umgawa’ Burden
Karl Constantine FOLKES 1935 (Portland)
Edgar Rice Burroughs
Creator of The Ape Man
Lord of the Jungle
Tarzan — the name means ‘White Skin’
Overseer of Africa.
This American
Burrowed in his native land
Tarred and asphalted
Paved an exotic landscape
Forested by animals.
With a brave leader
Of European origin
And nordic features
Inhabiting a jungle
Where he is sovereign master.
He is called Tarzan
An African-sounding name
To situate him
As a “native-foreigner”
Belonging — yet ‘set apart.’
A zany tarred name
Painted for a strange hero
Burrowed in the trees
Uttering a strange language
In a land even more strange.
He has a burden
To liberate Africa
To give it freedom
From all kinds of injustice
This is ‘The White Man’s Burden.’
This White Man’s Burden
Tarzan’s ‘Umgawa’ Burden
A Kipling mantra
Is echoed through Africa
As boomerang to Burroughs.
Upon reflection
Tarzan’s Umgawa Burden
Once it’s analyzed
Offers justification
For colonialism.
But times are changing
Burroughs and Kipling are gone
A new dawn rises
Africa as Mother Land
Holds promise for the whole world.
She will rise again
And her people will know her
As she who gave birth
And brought light into the world
To remove it from darkness.
Scheme | abcxd effxx gexcg bhxgx hxxxx edixe eEdda eExei xxxfj xgxjx |
---|---|
Poetic Form | Etheree (24%) Tetractys (20%) |
Metre | 10110 0101011 11010 101111 10101100 10100 101101 101 110101 1001100 10110 1010100 01010 0100010 1111010 1111 1100101 1101 1010100 0101101 01011 1010110 1001 1000110 0011011 11010 110100 11110 1111010 1101110 11110 1110 01010 1101100 110110 01010 1110 1110 100010 101000 11110 1001011 01110 1001101 1101011 11101 0010110 11111 0110101 1011110 |
Closest metre | Iambic trimeter |
Characters | 1,221 |
Words | 229 |
Sentences | 10 |
Stanzas | 10 |
Stanza Lengths | 5, 5, 5, 5, 5, 5, 5, 5, 5, 5 |
Lines Amount | 50 |
Letters per line (avg) | 19 |
Words per line (avg) | 4 |
Letters per stanza (avg) | 94 |
Words per stanza (avg) | 20 |
About this poem
“TARZAN” — A ZANY TARRED NAME! Rudyard Kipling’s (1865-1936) poem, “The White Man’s Burden,” offering justification for colonialism as the duty or burden of white nations to spread civilization to the non-white races, functions in synchronic harmony with Edgar Rice Burroughs’ (1875-1950) portrayal of the fictional heroic character of Tarzan, an archetypal feral apeman, with his ululating chest-thumping yell and his Swahili-like sounding coined utterance of “Umgawa” that, in earlier Tarzan shows, originally meant ‘Get Down,’ a command that morphed into whatever one chose it to mean; and which, to the natives of “Darkest Africa,” and Tarzan’s ‘entanglement’ with them, had Africa’s indigenous tribal folk ‘getting down’ or bowing down in perplexed lordship submission (In Kiswahili, the lingua franca word Umgawa or ‘Ngawa means entanglement). It is noteworthy to mention that Burroughs himself had never ‘entangled’ or set foot on the continent of Africa, employing only his fertile imagination to develop and compose the imaginary story of a British lord of the realm called Tarzan. What is even more fascinating to mention, is that it would appear that the two authors, Kipling, the Englishman, and Burroughs, the American, as contemporaries of each other in the hegemonic imperialist European world of Great Britain, politically allied with the United States of America as an emerging world power, were complicated admirers, the one with the other, as evidenced by a poem that Burroughs wrote, in April 1899, called “The Black Man’s Burden” that followed swiftly Kipling’s own publication of “The White Man’s Burden” in February 1899. While Kipling’s rhymed poem was composed in four stanzas of eight lines each, Burroughs’ poem, although maintaining Kipling’s rhymed feature, varied in structural composition. The first stanza of Kipling’s February 1899 poem reads as follows: “Take up the White Man’s burden - Send forth the best ye breed - Go bind your sons to exile To serve your captives’ need; To want in heavy harness, On fluttered folk and wild - Your new-caught, sullen peoples, Half-devil and half- child.” In contrast, Burroughs’ April 1899 poem, “The Black Man’s Burden,” is composed in a block style, rhymed verse of seventy two lines that seems to be written in the form of a debating retort to Kipling’s poem. Burroughs’ poem is written in the style of a parody and has an underlying tone of sarcasm that appears to weaken or destroy the abrasive imperialist tone of Kipling’s poem (or does it?). As example, the closing eight lines of Burroughs’ block-style poem reads as follows: “Take up the white man’s burden; Go learn to wear his clothes; You May look like the devil; But nobody cares who knows. Peruse a work of Darwin — Thank God that you’re alive —And learn the reason clearly: — The fittest alone survive.” Readers of this unrhymed seven-line one-stanza tanka poem, “Tarzan’s ‘Umgawa’ Burden,” are invited to read in entirety Kipling’s “The White Man’s Burden” and Burroughs’ “The Black Man’s Burden;” and compare and contrast their cultural messages and understanding for audiences of the twenty first century. more »
Written on August 31, 2022
Submitted by karlcfolkes on August 31, 2022
Modified by karlcfolkes on May 05, 2023
- 1:08 min read
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"Tarzan’s ‘Umgawa’ Burden" Poetry.com. STANDS4 LLC, 2024. Web. 16 May 2024. <https://www.poetry.com/poem-analysis/135094/tarzan%E2%80%99s-%E2%80%98umgawa%E2%80%99-burden>.
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