Stanza 1

Elegies are poems written to lament someone's death. In "An African Elegy" death isn't literal but figurative. The speaker is lamenting the death of a part of himself. The opening stanza creates a symbolic landscape full of exotic African creatures such as wildebeests, zebras, elephants, and okapi, a giraffe-like animal found in the Congo. Swahili are part of the Bantu peoples of eastern and central Africa. Duncan makes an explicit connection between the "marvelous" jungle in which the animals live and the "mind's / natural jungle." "Marvelous" primarily has a positive meaning here, but it picks up less benign associations as the poem develops. The preparation and hunting rituals engaged in by the Congolese men and women create a strange and ominous atmosphere in which death is omnipresent.

Stanza 2

Developing the image of death with which he ends the first stanza, Duncan personifies death here as "the dog-headed...