Somewhere in Africa (1966). Content and Description

“Somewhere in Africa” is an elegy written to John Holmes, the Boston poet who had been one of Sexton’s first teachers and mentors. In his workshop she had learned the techniques that allowed her to harness the wild images of her unconscious mind. Yet, Holmes had discouraged her from publishing her first collection, viewing the poems as too intimate, too embarrassingly frank in their presentation of her madness.

Holmes preferred a more conservative approach to poetry, one that depended on erudite literary allusions and traditional forms. Upon his death, in his honor, Sexton constructed one of her most formally wrought poems; “Somewhere in Africa” consists of seven quatrains of alternating end rhymes (abab cdcd) and one concluding couplet.

The first four stanzas explore the conventions of death. As always, death is accompanied by regret for unaccomplished goals. Holmes’s work The Fortune Teller had been considered for the National Book Award in 1962, and he was very disappointed when the honor went to someone else, leaving his “last book unsung.” Holmes’s illness had spread very quickly, and his death had taken his friends by surprise. The narrator appears distressed both by the lack of anger that has accompanied the death and by the inadequate respect paid to him by a “windy preacher.”

Sexton relies on the imagery of a garden to denote the growth and spread of the illness, “a dark thing.” She writes with the descriptive detail of lush and uncontrolled growth: “cancer blossomed in your throat, / rooted like bougainvillea into your gray backbone,” while “thick petals, the exotic reds, the purples and whites / covered up your nakedness.” For this poet, though, unable to be saved by science and “mourned as father and teacher,” death has the potential for a new and voluptuous life.

In the final three stanzas and the couplet, Sexton develops her vision of eternal poetic life and shows her respect for her mentor, whom she represents as “stronger than mahogany” and “requiring twelve strong men” to row him into eternity. The authority of death is mitigated by the presence of a powerful woman god (“known but forbidden”) who can deliver the poet to a rich, exotic resting place: “a woman who will place you / upon her shallow boat, who is a woman naked to the waist / moist with palm oil and sweat, a woman of some virtue / and wild breasts, her limbs excellent, unbruised and chaste.”

In her tightly structured homage to her mentor, Sexton has honored the convention of the river entrance to the eternity, but she has altered the gender of the traditional gods of the afterlife. Holmes, who could not approve of her untamed poetic expression, will doubtless be surprised to find the sensual, untamed goddess Sexton has willed to await him.

The final couplet invests the dead poet with gravity and value (“cut from a single tree”) and sends him off into a new life of well-deserved riches “down the river with the ivory, the copra and the gold,” borne there by 12 strong men and one fearless, forbidden woman.

For Discussion or Writing:
1. Consider Sexton’s use of Africa in this poem. Why do you think she chose this mythical setting for her elegy to a Boston poet?

2. Compare the vision of death that Sexton created in “The Truth the Dead Know” with the fate that awaits the deceased John Holmes.

3. Holmes’s objections to her intimate poems led Sexton to write a defense of the style that would become known as confessional. Read “To John, Who Begs Me Not to Enquire Further,” and compare the form she is defending to the style of “Somewhere in Africa.”

Works Cited and Additional Resources:
“Anne Sexton.” Modern American Poetry. Available online. URL: http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/ poets/s_z/sexton/sexton.htm. Accessed May 21, 2007.

“Anne Sexton.” Poets.org. Available online. URL: http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/14. Accessed by May 21, 2007.
Cam, Heather. “Sylvia Plath’s Debt to Anne Sexton.” American Literature 59, no. 3. (October 1987): 429-432.

Colburn, Steven E., ed. Anne Sexton: Telling the Tale. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1988.
No Evil Star: Selected Essays, Interviews, and Prose of Anne Sexton. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1985.

Davison, Peter. “A New Skin: Anne Sexton, 19561961.” In The Fading Smile. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1994.
Gallagher, Brian. “The Expanded Use of Simile in Anne Sexton’s Transformations.” Notes on Modern American Literature 3 (Summer 1979): 9-13.