Analysis of 'Drought' by Denys Lefebvre
The poem’s title evokes aridity, and the hot expanses of the South African veldt. The spatial or environmental aspects of the poem are therefore made clear from the outset: this is to be a climatic and geographical case study of a specific locale, and a descriptive analysis of its inhabitants.
The opening noun, ‘heat’, followed immediately by a caesura in the form of a comma, foregrounds the poet’s interest in the temperature and physical sensations associated with the African landscape, and this close analysis, or scrutiny, is reinforced by the compound adjective ‘all-pervading’ and the verb ‘crinkles - words with definite connotations of heat and dryness, and whose etymology is particularly apt. ‘Pervading’, for instance, is a Latinate adjective which suggests heat ‘going through’, or saturating, the landscape, and this sense of stifling, almost unsupportable heat, is picked up in the poet’s references to ‘deathly’ heat and the ‘molten’ air: images which seem almost hyperbolic in their suggestion of intense and powerful temperatures.
The metaphor ‘islands scorched and bare’ heightens the reader’s sense of intense heat and evokes also the parching conditions of the veldt: the islands in questions are, one notes, not a literal archipelago but, instead, a series of raised mounds on dry riverbeds - merely the physical remnants of previous inundations, and pathetic symbols of the landscape’s transformation from lush, fecund environment to baked, scorched earth. The poem’s opening quatrain thus serves as an introductory overview of the conditions in the veldt, and anticipates the elaboration and descriptive clarification which follow.
The poem’s second quatrain introduces ‘wide-eyed’ oxen; victims of the heat who ‘huddle’, ‘pant’ and seek shelter from the fiery sun. The poet’s description of these animals as ‘gaunt and spent’ suggests lassitude and extreme fatigue - as though the sun were a source of death rather than life. This paradox is intensified by the images of the oxen huddling near a ‘shrunken’ pool: the diminishing water emblematic of their gradual decline and inevitable destruction. The striking images of ‘trees and pastures cool’ evoke a desperate longing for shelter and protection, whilst the verb ‘lashing’, with its harsh vowel sound and connotations of physical pain, reminds the reader that the animals in the poem are, essentially, doomed: their pathetic attempts to ‘foil flies’ symbolic of approaching annihilation, emphasised by the alliterative qualities of the ‘f’ sounds.
The poem’s final, third, quatrain, introduces the only non-animal figure in the poem: an anthropomorphic ‘sun-god’ who recalls Helios from Greek mythology. This god, like Helios or Hyperion, drives a chariot of ‘steeds’ across the sky and is the source of the exhausting heat evoked elsewhere. The alliterative collocation ‘blinding, blazing’ suggests remorseless and savage heat, whilst the god’s progress across the sky to the metaphorical ‘gates of night’ implies an inevitable return - and, hence, the prolongation of the agony outlined in the opening lines of the sonnet.
The final rhyming couplet opens with the dramatically terse sentence ‘and still no rain’, and its monosyllabic brevity implies brute fact: the ultimate futility of hope in such dry, blistering heat. The reference to rain here recalls the trees and pastures glimpsed in line seven, but these fragmentary images of relief and the cooling properties of water are outweighed by the many images of death, sterility and heat: even the poem’s final words, with their emphatic alliteration, imply the impossibility of renewal, as ‘all things droop and die’.
The poet’s deft handling of the linguistic range of the poem is underpinned by his appropriation of the closed form of the traditional sonnet: the iambic lines and structural elements of the poem contributing to the sense of finality and inevitability which he explores. The regular rhyme scheme is also relevant to the poem’s evocation of fatalism, and the use of masculine rhyme is integral to the creation of phonic - and thematic - power. It might be said that the poet’s use of the sonnet form signals a desire to contain or organise his powerful emotional response to the heat of the veldt, whilst the typographical arrangement of the sonnet on the page, along with its sense of stopping, starting, stress, and syllabic patterning, equates to his desire to find the appropriate form to express his emotions. It is certainly relevant to the poem’s successful evocation of drought conditions that the sonnet form limits the poet’s expressive potential, and even his word count: the restriction of ten syllables per line perhaps mirroring the difficulty of surviving in so inhospitable a climate.
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