Analysis of Dennis Brutus’s At a Funeral

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on June 8, 2025

AT A FUNERAL – DENNIS BRUTUS
Black, green and gold at sunset: pageantry
And stubbled graves: expectant, of eternity,
In bride’s-white, nun’s-white veils the nurses gush their bounty
Of red-wine cloaks, frothing the bugled dirging slopes
Salute! “hen ponder all this hollow panoply
For one whose gifts the mud devours, with our hopes.

Oh all you frustrate ones, powers tombed in dirt,
Aborted, not by Death but carrion books of birth
Arise! The brassy shout of freedom stirs our earth;
Not death but death’s-head tyranny scythes our ground
And plots our narrow cells of pain defeat and dearth:
Better that we should die, than that we should lie down

As a highly mannered poem that combines lavish figurative language with precisely recorded images to protest the apartheid system in South Africa, At a Funeral provides an excellent example of Dennis Brutus’s early poetry. Dedicated to Valencia Majombozi, a young African doctor who died an untimely death, it begins as an elegy for lost hopes and ends as a defiant call to arms.

At a Funeral is neatly divided into two stanzas made up of six loosely rhymed lines of varying length. The first stanza sets the scene for the poem by describing the funeral as a mass rallying point. The political significance of this event is immediately made clear through reference to “Black, green and gold” (l. 1), the colors of the African National Congress (ANC). Observing the ministrations of the nurses dressed like nuns, the speaker acknowledges the martyred status of the deceased. But he seems deeply ambivalent about this sacrifice, as he refers to the spectacle of the funeral as a “hollow panoply” (l. 5).

Moving beyond the immediate scene of the funeral, the second stanza calls on “powers tombed in dirt” (l. 10), attempting not only to resurrect those who have already fallen in the struggle against oppression but also to revivify the spirit of freedom that inspired them. According to the speaker, this spirit is held in check by “carrion books of birth” (l. 8), perhaps alluding to the pass books that Black South Africans were required to carry at all times and that governed their movements. Tyranny takes the place of Death here to prepare “narrow cells of pain, defeat and dearth” (l. 11), as much a reference to government housing as to burial chambers.

Such personification points to the influence of 17th-century metaphysical poetry on Brutus as a young poet. Certainly, At a Funeral could be categorized with Claude McKay’s If We Must Die as a protest poem that draws heavily on the English poetic tradition. At the same time, of course, it is enlivened by a wealth of journalistic details that make clear its South African birthright.

At a Funeral originally appeared in Sirens, Knuckles, Boots (1963), Brutus’s first volume of poetry. It was also included in A Simple Lust (1973), a compilation of the poet’s earliest work. Since then, the poem has been widely anthologized, most recently in the fourth edition of Penguin’s Modern African Poetry (1998), edited by Gerald Moore and Ulli Beier.

Works Cited

Brutus, Dennis. A Simple Lust: Collected Poems of South African Jail and Exile Including “Letters to Martha.” Heinemann, 1973.
———. Sirens, Knuckles, Boots. Mbari Productions, 1963.
Moore, Gerald, and Ulli Beier, editors. Modern African Poetry. 4th ed., Penguin, 1998.