Maria White Lowell’s “Africa” is a remarkable artifact of mid-nineteenth-century American poetic imagination—a work that synthesizes Romantic sensibility, abolitionist conviction, and a mythopoetic vision of the African continent as both cradle of civilization and suffering mother. Though often overshadowed by her husband James Russell Lowell’s more canonical output, Maria White Lowell (1821–1853) emerges in this poem as a poet of formidable vision and emotional depth, capable of weaving historical consciousness with lyrical intensity. “Africa” stands as a sustained personification of the continent, rendered not as a geopolitical abstraction but as a maternal sovereign whose ancient glory has been eclipsed by centuries of violence, exploitation, and cultural amnesia. Through evocative imagery, prophetic voice, and layered allusions to Egyptology, classical antiquity, and biblical cosmogony, Lowell crafts a meditation on civilizational rise and fall that transcends mere lamentation to become a moral and philosophical inquiry into the nature of knowledge, power, and human dignity.

The poem opens with Africa seated on a desert shore, her posture both regal and resigned: “She sat where the level sands / Sent back the sky's fierce glare; / She folded her mighty hands, / And waited with calm despair.” The oxymoron “calm despair” immediately signals the poem’s emotional register—a dignity that survives even as hope recedes. This opening tableau is not merely descriptive; it is symbolic. The desert, often associated in Western literature with barrenness or emptiness, here becomes the stage for a mythic confrontation between memory and erasure. Africa is not absent; she is present, watching, waiting—her despair not hysterical but stoic, rooted in centuries of silent witness. The “red sun dropped down the streaming air” suggests both temporal closure and a bleeding world, as if the sky itself mourns her fate.

Africa’s “throne” is constructed from the very elements that have historically defined Africa’s wealth in the Western imagination: cinnamon, ivory, copper. These are not arbitrary luxuries but commodities that would, in later centuries, fuel European colonial desire. Cinnamon—associated with the spice trade and ancient luxury—evokes the incense-laden altars of antiquity; ivory, a material long prized for carvings and ornaments, symbolizes both beauty and the brutal extraction that would follow; copper, “barred with the setting sun,” merges metallurgy with divine light, suggesting that Africa’s material culture is inseparable from cosmic order. The throne, “broad and low,” is not one of ostentatious domination but of grounded sovereignty—a sovereignty now unacknowledged.

The sensory landscape deepens with the “low and sullen roar / Of lions” and the “neigh of the hippopotamus,” animals emblematic of Africa’s wild vitality. Yet these are not merely decorative; they underscore the continent’s primal energy, its untamed life force that persists even in the face of human diminishment. The lions’ “eyes of flame” recall both biblical beasts and Romantic symbols of untamable spirit, while the hippopotamus—often overlooked in Western bestiaries but central in African cosmologies—reasserts the specificity of Africa’s natural world. These creatures are not alien; they are Africa’s companions in solitude, part of a world that endures beyond human empires.

The poem’s central conceit—the personification of Africa as a dark-skinned, ancient mother—is steeped in both biblical and classical traditions. Her “great dusk face” is “dark as the primal night / Ere over the earth God spake,” a formulation that draws on Genesis but also subtly contests the Enlightenment-era association of darkness with ignorance. Here, darkness precedes creation; it is not absence but potentiality. In equating Africa’s skin with the pre-creative void, Lowell paradoxically elevates her to the status of cosmic origin. This theological gesture is radical for its time: rather than positioning Africa as derivative or belated, it places her at the dawn of human consciousness.

When Africa speaks, her voice is both elegiac and authoritative. She recounts a golden age in which she was “sole Queen the broad earth through,” nurturing her children with “Wisdom’s dew.” This is not a myth of passive motherhood but of active intellectual transmission. The children do not merely receive; they learn, create, and build. The reference to “Numbers” and “Music” aligns with the classical liberal arts, but here they are not European inventions—they are African gifts. The invocation of Memnon—the legendary Ethiopian king and son of Eos, the dawn goddess—is particularly significant. In Greco-Roman myth, Memnon’s statue was said to sing at sunrise, a marvel that attracted pilgrims and poets alike. By claiming Memnon as her own, Africa reclaims a figure often appropriated by Mediterranean narratives and restores him to his African origins. The “lutings rare” that greet the sun evoke a harmonious cosmos, where music bridges heaven and earth—a vision of art as sacred mediation.

The poem then turns to the Pyramids, described not as tombs but as “broad tents” pitched beside the Nile—temporary dwellings for eternal ideas. This metaphor reframes the monumental architecture of ancient Egypt as an act of intellectual hospitality rather than funerary obsession. The Pyramids become sites where “Thought’s supreme commands” are realized through collective labor, suggesting that Africa’s greatness lay not in autocracy but in communal ingenuity. The “white walls” adorned with painting further attest to a culture that valued narrative, movement, and procession—qualities that resist the static, dehumanizing stereotypes of African societies prevalent in Lowell’s era.

Yet this golden age collapses not through internal decay but through external violence: “They lapsed away, / Their great light quenched in twilight gray, / Within their winding tombs they lay.” The agency of decline is ambiguous—does “they” refer to Africa’s children turning away from wisdom, or to invaders extinguishing their light? The poem leans toward the latter, especially as it progresses. The “centuries” that “went slowly by” are not neutral; they are marked by Africa’s “sleepless eye,” a haunting image of perpetual vigilance in grief. She does not forget; she cannot.

A crucial shift occurs with the arrival of the “winds like mighty spirits,” described with almost Miltonic grandeur: “Alive and pure and strong as flame, / At last to lift me from my shame.” These winds are messianic—they see what the world has ignored: that Africa’s “kingdom stretches far away; / Beyond the utmost verge of day, / Her myriad children dance and play.” This vision of vibrant, present-day African life directly counters the dominant narrative of African “savagery” or stagnation. The winds recognize a continuity of culture and joy that colonial discourse would deny. It is this recognition that reawakens Africa’s maternal heart: “Then throbbed my mother's heart again, / Then knew my pulse's finer pain.”

She seeks out her “young barbarians”—a term used not pejoratively but affectionately, in the classical sense of those outside Greek or Roman civilization. They live in a world of “mellower light” and “heavier blooms,” where nature provides abundantly. The description is idyllic, even Edenic: “Their bread, on emerald dishes laid, / Sets forth a banquet in each shade.” This is not primitivism; it is a critique of industrial modernity. Africa envisions a life unburdened by alienated labor, where human needs are met in harmony with the earth. The “thoughtful bees” who store honey for them symbolize a natural economy of care, in contrast to the extractive logic of empire.

But this vision of innocence is soon shattered. The poem’s most harrowing passage describes the advent of the transatlantic slave trade: “There came a change. They took my free, / My careless ones, and the great sea / Blew back their endless sighs to me.” The sea, once a symbol of separation, now becomes a mirror of collective trauma, returning the cries of the enslaved to their mother. The “earthquake shudderings” and “keen spears of gold” evoke both literal violence and the destabilization of moral order. Gold—another African resource—becomes a weapon, “thrusting red hearts down, not yet cold.” The visceral imagery (“throbbing wildly,” “dreadful groans”) forces the reader to confront the physical reality of slavery, not as an abstract historical event but as an ongoing wound in the continent’s body.

Africa’s retreat to the desert is not escape but witness. “Still they followed on the air, / And still I hear them everywhere”—the haunting is not spectral but psychological, ethical. The poem insists that the trauma of slavery reverberates across time and space, embedding itself in the very atmosphere. Africa’s final posture—“rigid and black, as carved in stone”—returns her to the iconography of ancient statues, those silent testifiers in temple and tomb. Yet now the silence is not ceremonial but suffocating, the result of a world that refuses to listen.

Historically, Maria White Lowell wrote “Africa” in the 1840s, a period of intensifying abolitionist activism in the United States. As the wife of a prominent anti-slavery intellectual and herself a committed activist—she was among the first American women to publicly advocate for abolition—Lowell’s poem must be read as part of a broader political and moral project. Yet “Africa” transcends mere propaganda. It avoids the didacticism that often mars politically motivated poetry of the era. Instead, it constructs a mythic framework through which the ethical dimensions of slavery can be felt, not just argued. By centering Africa as a speaking subject—noble, ancient, wounded—Lowell challenges the dehumanizing rhetoric that underpinned both slavery and colonialism.

Comparatively, “Africa” resonates with other nineteenth-century poetic attempts to reclaim African dignity, such as Phillis Wheatley’s “On Being Brought from Africa to America” or later works by Paul Laurence Dunbar and Countee Cullen. But Lowell’s approach is distinct in its synthesis of Egyptology, Romantic personification, and maternal allegory. Unlike Wheatley, who appeals to Christian universalism, Lowell roots Africa’s greatness in pre-Christian, indigenous achievements. And unlike later Harlem Renaissance poets who often looked to West Africa or the diaspora, Lowell’s vision is firmly anchored in North Africa and the Nile Valley—a reflection of the era’s Egyptological fascination, but also a strategic reclamation of classical heritage.

Philosophically, the poem engages with the tension between cyclical and linear time. Africa’s narrative moves through ages of glory, decline, renewal, and again devastation—a rhythm that echoes Vico’s Scienza Nuova or the Hindu concept of yugas. Yet the poem resists fatalism. The “slow-moving hand of Fate” at the end is not indifferent; it is delayed, perhaps awaiting human action. The very act of writing the poem becomes a form of intervention—giving voice to the voiceless, restoring memory to the erased.

Emotionally, “Africa” achieves a rare balance between grandeur and intimacy. The poem’s scale is epic—spanning continents and millennia—yet its core is profoundly personal: a mother mourning her children. This duality amplifies its impact. Readers are not asked merely to admire ancient ruins but to feel the ache of a continent that remembers every loss. The “drear and dead” queen is not a relic but a living conscience.

In conclusion, Maria White Lowell’s “Africa” is a luminous example of how poetry can serve as both historical reckoning and moral imagination. It refuses to let Africa be reduced to a site of extraction or a symbol of backwardness. Instead, it restores her to her rightful place—as philosopher, artist, architect, and mother of civilization. In an age when African cultures were systematically denigrated, Lowell dared to envision their splendor, to hear their silence as speech, and to frame their suffering as a call to conscience. The poem’s enduring power lies not only in its lyrical beauty but in its unflinching insistence that to forget Africa’s past is to betray the future. And in that insistence, it remains urgently relevant—not as a relic of abolitionist sentiment, but as a living testament to the resilience of memory and the poetry that keeps it alive.

William Bell Scott’s “Seeking Forgetfulness” is a compact but remarkably capacious meditation on memory, identity, and the desire to escape the selves that survive within the self. Its speaker does not merely remember a past life; he experiences the past as an active, pursuing force. The poem dramatizes a condition familiar to modern psychological language but rendered here through Gothic and visionary imagery: the sense that one’s former identities remain present, altered, accusatory, and difficult to dismiss. Forgetfulness, in this context, is not simple absent-mindedness or the natural fading of experience. It is imagined as a difficult liberation from old versions of the self, from abandoned ambitions, passions, errors, disguises, and intimate companions who may all have become indistinguishable in retrospect. The poem’s emotional power arises from its refusal to make this liberation easy. The speaker wishes to be rid of the past, yet his language reveals that the past is inseparable from his own being.

The opening phrase, “And yet,” immediately places the poem in the midst of an inward argument. Something has evidently preceded this moment of reflection, even if it is not supplied to the reader; the speaker’s thought arrives as a concession, correction, or relapse. Such an opening is psychologically apt, because memory often returns precisely when one believes it has been overcome. The speaker presents himself “as one who looks behind,” a phrase that establishes the poem’s central posture. To look behind is to interrupt forward movement. It is to be divided between the direction in which one travels and the direction from which one has come. The image is especially poignant because the speaker is a “traveller,” a figure conventionally associated with progress, discovery, and purposeful passage. Here, however, travel has become estrangement. He wanders “in a shadowed land astray,” uncertain not only of his destination but of the reality surrounding him.

The poem’s landscape is both external and mental. The “shadowed land” may be read as a dreamscape, a region of recollection, a moral wilderness, or the dim borderland between conscious self-knowledge and repressed experience. Scott intensifies the uncertainty by placing the traveller “upon the boundary / Of actual things.” This boundary is one of the poem’s most suggestive locations. The speaker is not fully outside reality, but neither is he securely within it. He inhabits a threshold where material fact gives way to apparition. The wording implies that memory has destabilized the ordinary world: actual things are no longer sufficient, because the traveller sees beside them, behind them, and perhaps within them a multitude of unreal yet emotionally potent presences. The poem thus belongs to a nineteenth-century fascination with liminal consciousness, spectral recurrence, dreams, and divided identity. It finds terror not in an invading monster but in the discovery that the self is already haunted by itself.

Scott’s use of the traveller also participates in a long Romantic and post-Romantic tradition. Romantic poetry frequently turns the solitary wanderer into a figure for consciousness moving through nature, history, or spiritual crisis. Yet Scott’s traveller is less a seeker of transcendent revelation than a man burdened by retrospection. He does not encounter sublime mountains, radiant landscapes, or instructive natural presences; instead, he turns “against the wind” to look for ghosts. The wind may suggest resistance, time’s onward force, or the harsh pressure of circumstances. To turn against it is an act of deliberate defiance, but it is also an act of self-defeating fixation. The traveller chooses to face what he should perhaps leave behind. This paradox is central to the poem: its title announces a search for forgetfulness, while the poem itself depicts a speaker actively summoning the memories he longs to escape. Forgetting cannot be attained by compulsive return.

The ghosts that follow the speaker are described as “simulacral,” a learned and unusually precise word. A simulacrum is an image, resemblance, or imitation that may persist after the original has vanished. By calling the ghosts simulacral, Scott avoids presenting them as straightforward revenants from the past. They are not preserved identities in any pure or stable form. They are copies of copies, distorted remnants generated by memory, imagination, guilt, and fear. This distinction matters profoundly. The past selves that trouble the speaker are not necessarily accurate representations of who he once was; they are transformed by the passage of time and by the present self’s need to interpret them. Memory creates ghosts not only by retaining what is gone, but by altering it. The speaker is haunted, then, by versions of himself that are at once recognizable and false, intimate and alien.

The repeated “an hundred” gives these apparitions an overwhelming abundance. The phrase does not require literal calculation; rather, it conveys the multiplying force of remembrance. A single past self would be manageable, perhaps even consoling. But the speaker confronts a crowd: “an hundred simulacral ghosts,” “an hundred pairs of eyes.” This multiplication suggests that identity is not a sequence of cleanly replaced selves but an accumulation of overlapping lives. Every important choice, emotional attachment, social role, aspiration, and failure may leave behind its own spectral trace. The eyes are particularly disturbing because they turn memory into judgment. The past does not simply follow; it watches. The speaker has become the object of scrutiny for those he used to be. In this image, self-consciousness takes on a nearly persecutory form. He is observed from behind by the very identities he thought he had outgrown.

Scott’s simile comparing the eyes to “phosphorescent flies” produces an eerie mixture of beauty and disgust. Phosphorescence belongs to darkness; it is light that appears where ordinary illumination fails. The image makes the ghosts visible, but only through a cold, unnatural gleam. Flies, meanwhile, are small, swarming, restless creatures, often associated with decay and corruption. Their light is not the noble radiance of stars or angels. It flickers close to the body, irritates the senses, and suggests a nocturnal world of decomposition. The image therefore carries an emotional complexity characteristic of the poem as a whole. The past is repellent, but it also shines. The speaker cannot entirely dismiss these former selves because they possess a strange vitality. They are degraded from their original life, perhaps, but they remain animated by an uncanny luminosity.

The turn in the poem’s thought arrives with the startling admission: “And all of them himself, yet changed in kind.” This is the poem’s governing paradox. The ghosts are not strangers, though they appear as strangers; they are not dead, though they belong to the past; they are not wholly false, though they are simulacra. The phrase “changed in kind” goes beyond the ordinary recognition that people change over time. It implies a transformation of species or essence. The speaker’s earlier selves have become something fundamentally other. Such language recalls philosophical questions about personal identity: what makes a person the same person across time? Is continuity preserved by memory, bodily existence, moral responsibility, temperament, or consciousness? Scott does not offer a theoretical answer. Instead, he stages the emotional experience of discontinuity. The speaker feels connected to his former selves, but he cannot inhabit them. They have become alien forms of life.

The next movement deepens this crisis through a sequence of urgent questions: “Those once I was, which of them now am I?” The syntax compresses past and present into a single bewildered inquiry. The speaker knows that he “was” these figures, but he cannot identify any one of them as the self he presently is. His response, “Not one,” is devastating in its brevity. It suggests that identity cannot be recovered by choosing among prior roles. None of the old selves is adequate to the current moment. Yet this does not free him, because he remains surrounded by their traces. The poem’s sadness lies partly in this double recognition: the past cannot be restored, but it cannot be discarded. Human personality appears as a succession of masks that are no longer wearable but still cannot be thrown away.

The image of “long-abandoned masks” brings theatricality into the poem’s study of the self. Masks can conceal, transform, protect, entertain, or deceive. In Scott’s usage, they imply the roles a person has played in different periods of life: the lover, dreamer, rebel, believer, artist, companion, or perhaps the morally compromised self. To call them masks does not necessarily mean they were insincere. A mask may reveal a truth otherwise inaccessible; in performance, one becomes visible by assuming a form. Yet these masks are “abandoned,” and their abandonment is emotionally ambiguous. The speaker has left them behind, perhaps out of necessity, maturity, disillusionment, or shame. But an abandoned mask retains the shape of a face. It is an empty object that still seems to demand the return of the person who once animated it. Scott transforms the ordinary language of social performance into a haunting image of historical selfhood.

The phrase “in some witches’ sabbath long since past” shifts the poem decisively into a Gothic register. A witches’ sabbath traditionally evokes nocturnal assembly, forbidden rites, ecstatic disorder, demonic parody, and moral transgression. Scott does not insist that the speaker’s earlier life was literally wicked; rather, he uses the sabbath to describe the fevered, bewildering intensity of the past. The old masks “did dance awhile” in the speaker’s “life’s panoply,” suggesting a procession of costumes, weapons, ornaments, and ceremonial display. “Panoply” originally refers to a full suit of armor, but it also denotes a splendid or extensive array. The word gives the speaker’s life both martial and theatrical dimensions. His past identities have been costumes in an elaborate pageant, but they have also been forms of defense. The self appears as something armed, adorned, staged, and perpetually changing.

There is an important cultural resonance in Scott’s imagery. Writing in the Victorian period, Scott belonged to a generation intensely interested in the visible remnants of history: medieval architecture, legend, costume, folklore, religious ritual, and the persistence of the past within modern life. As a Scottish poet, painter, and critic, and as a figure moving near Pre-Raphaelite artistic circles without being reducible to them, Scott was deeply alert to the imaginative appeal of medieval and Gothic materials. His poetry often demonstrates a painterly sensibility, a capacity to arrange atmosphere through visual detail. In “Seeking Forgetfulness,” however, the Gothic is not decorative antiquarianism. The witches’ gathering, the ghostly eyes, and the shadowed boundary serve a modern psychological purpose. They externalize inner division. The medievally inflected nightmare becomes a vocabulary for describing the fractured consciousness of an individual confronting his own history.

Scott’s biography makes this concern with divided identity especially resonant, though the poem should not be treated as a simple confession. He lived a life that crossed several artistic and professional worlds: poetry, painting, criticism, design, and public work in art education. He was connected to major Victorian cultural debates and friendships, including those surrounding the Rossetti family and the broader artistic revival of medieval subjects and intense symbolic imagery. Such a career could foster an acute awareness of role-playing and changing vocation. The poem’s speaker may therefore be understood as a figure shaped by the pressures of artistic self-fashioning, though its insight reaches far beyond any single biographical circumstance. Scott recognizes that a life is not experienced as a unified narrative while it is being lived. Only later do its episodes gather into a disturbing procession, and only later does one wonder which version of oneself was most authentic.

The final image of drinking “from out of the same flasks” introduces an unexpected intimacy. The ghosts are not merely persecutors. They once shared the speaker’s sustenance, pleasure, intoxication, and fellowship. The flask can suggest companionship, celebration, appetite, and the consumption of whatever experience life offers. In the context of the witches’ sabbath, it may also imply forbidden or excessive indulgence. But its strongest effect is to make the relation between present and past selves almost communal. They drank together because they were, in a sense, one company. This image complicates any attempt to interpret the poem as a straightforward repudiation of youthful error. The speaker may regret these former selves, but he has lived with them intimately. Their desires were his desires; their pleasures were his pleasures. Forgetting them would mean forgetting part of the substance from which his present identity has been formed.

The concluding question, “Am I not rid of these, not even at last?” is framed as a plea, but it receives no answer. Its double negative conveys exhaustion and impatience. “At last” suggests that the speaker has already waited a long time for release. Perhaps he has changed his circumstances, outlived former relationships, renounced earlier beliefs, or passed beyond the passions that once governed him. Yet the ghosts remain. The poem’s ending is powerful because it does not resolve whether liberation is possible. Forgetfulness may be desired, but the poem implies that complete self-forgetting would be neither easy nor entirely desirable. If all former selves vanished, what continuity would remain? The speaker’s suffering derives from memory, but memory is also the evidence that his life has been multiple, intense, and real. The poem leaves him caught between the burden of recollection and the terror of inner emptiness.

“Seeking Forgetfulness” can thus be read as an exploration of the ethics as well as the psychology of memory. To remember former selves may entail shame, grief, and alienation, but it may also entail responsibility. A person cannot simply declare the past unreal because it has become uncomfortable. The ghosts’ watching eyes imply that old actions continue to make claims upon the present. At the same time, Scott refuses a moralistic simplification in which the past is merely punished or judged. His speaker’s old selves are grotesque, theatrical, and perhaps compromised, but they are also fellow travellers in the great pageant of a life. The poem’s imaginative richness lies in this refusal to sever identity cleanly into innocence and guilt, truth and falsehood, life and death. It understands that people are made from continuities they cannot fully control.

The poem’s language moves with impressive compression from landscape to apparition, from apparition to philosophical inquiry, and from inquiry to ritualized memory. Its emotional movement resembles a spiral: the speaker turns back, sees the pursuing figures, recognizes them as himself, attempts to classify them as masks, and ends by asking whether he can ever be free. Each image intensifies rather than dispels the crisis. The shadowed land becomes a swarm of phosphorescent eyes; the eyes become former selves; the former selves become masks dancing in a dark ceremony; the masks become drinking companions. This succession prevents the poem from becoming abstract. Identity is not discussed in detached philosophical terms; it is made visible, tactile, and frightening. Scott allows the reader to feel the pressure of a past that has lost its ordinary coherence but retained its emotional force.

For modern readers, the poem remains deeply compelling because it captures an experience that is at once private and universal. Many people know the unsettling sensation of encountering an old letter, photograph, place, or remembered decision and feeling that the person who lived that moment was both oneself and someone else. Scott gives that sensation its full Gothic grandeur. He does not trivialize change by treating it as uncomplicated growth, nor does he sentimentalize the past as a repository of lost innocence. Instead, he presents personal history as a haunted archive, crowded with images that glow in the dark and demand acknowledgment. The desire for forgetfulness is understandable, even urgent; yet the poem’s enduring wisdom is that the self cannot escape its earlier forms without also confronting the strange, difficult fact that they remain part of its own living panoply.