The Poetry of Charles Mungoshi

Charles Mungoshi is an accomplished poet, although he is best known for his fiction. Two major themes that run through his poems are an exploration of the meaning or significance of life, as well as a deeply ironic fascination with time. Broadly speaking, three outlooks on life can be found in his poems: first, the nihilistic perspective; second, a positive celebration of the miracle of life; and third, a fascination with the element of regeneration, particularly within the context of natural rhythms or cycles. Time features prominently, with great emphasis laid on its passage. The different attitudes toward time adopted by youths and adults provide the basis for ironic commentary and contrasts are drawn between human perceptions of time and natural cycles. The process of aging clearly intrigues the poet.

Given the scarcity of copies of Mungoshi's collection The Milkman Doesn't Only Deliver Milk, I shall quote extensively from most of the poems that will be analyzed in detail. "Sitting on the Balcony" portrays life as grim, repetitive, boring, and purposeless:

Sitting on the balcony
fingering a glass of beer
I have bought without
any intention to drink:
I see a little boy
poking for something
in a refuse dump:
looking for a future?
I am afraid the stars say
your roads leads to another
balcony, just like this one:
where you will sit
fingering a beer you have bought
without any intention to drink. (23)

The persona's disillusionment is projected onto the indigent boy and the pessimistic forecast of the "stars" suggests that the "future" holds no promise whatsoever. Life amounts to little more than a repetitive cycle characterized by inertia. This sense of aimlessness is amplified in "The Final Demand":

To climb so totally out of your deepest self
clutching nothing

nothing at all
of all
choices given: love, hate, anger, hope, dream, ideal:
nothing.

To salvage nothing at all,
even the idea of nothing.
The world lives on
has lived on
and will live on
without you. (26)

The opening lines highlight the effort involved in climbing out of the depths of one's being, "clutching nothing / nothing at all." All emotions, dreams, hopes, aspirations are abandoned in favor of the stability of nullification. The concluding stanza emphasizes the insignificance of the subject's life—"The world lives on," irrespective of "your" plight. Man is not the "miracle of creation," the center of life. He is quite insignificant.

At the opposite end of the spectrum, there are poems that exult in the resilience of the human spirit—for example, "Alone":

Night thicker than the oily smoke
of machinery
befogs all: boss and industrial sites.

My dream opens inward, flowering,
towers up
above and beyond
the tallest\man-made city building.

I breathe deeply:
God, isn't it beautiful
that this real flesh and blood body
isn't just a patchwork extension of
steel machinery.

And this living breath
not just a figment of someone's cantankerous imagination? (1)

This poem can be read on both a spiritual and a secular level. A Christian reading, based on the last two stanzas, dwells on the diction, which calls to mind certain famous hymns, like "Breathe on me, Breath of God," the final stanza of which echoes the central motif of transcendence found in the poem:

Breathe on me, Breath of God;
So shall I never die,
But live with Thee the perfect life
Of Thine eternity. Amen. (Methodist Hymn-Book 116)

One can also read the poem in secular terms, placing emphasis on the persona's stubborn insistence on his autonomy, symbolized by his "dream" that flowers and "towers up" beyond the limitations of life (as a factory hand?). The darkness of the "Night" transcends anything that humans make, as does the persona's dream. Industrialization, which can be taken to represent mankind's desire to triumph over or transform nature, is seen as lifeless by the speaker in the poem...