These Beasts and the Benin Bronze

By Margaret Danner

“Africans are beasts.”
—The Reverend Carroll

Dave Garroway’s Mr. J. Fred Muggs often thumps
quite a rhythmical thump with his feet,
doesn’t he? Sometimes he seems pretty clever.

But irrespective of his Fauntleroy and other neat
and obviously dear apparel, have you ever
wondered whether he, if his very life

depended on it, could take a stave from a barrel
and curve a small, smooth, round stick? And while
it is evident (from the ever growing strife

resulting from the wider scope of guile)
that a talking snake is working overtime,
not even in the bible did a dragon

horse or serpent use a sculptor’s knife
nor can as sacred a thing as a Hindu cow carve or
even draw one of those lovely Indian girls, or a wagon

for that matter. And I’ve studied Bushman for years
and can, along with the thousands of others who
loved the big brute, attest to his dignity and near-

human intelligence, but he couldn’t have fashioned one true
free form or, if given a knife, whittled one whistle.
No history has chronicled a four-legged sculptor,

so how can we reconcile this beast epistle
to this pure Benin bronze, for with all
the contraptions that moderns have to aid them
their skill doesn’t compete
with these masks, so what beast made them?

Notes:

David Garroway (1913–1982) was a white American television personality who cohosted the Today show from 1953–1957 with a chimpanzee named “J. Fred Muggs.

Reprinted with permission of Broadside Lotus Press from Impressions of African Art Forms in the Poetry of Margaret Danner (Broadside Press, 1960).

This work is part of the portfolio “‘These Blazing Forms’: The Life and Work of Margaret Danner” from the March 2022 issue.

Source: Poetry (March 2022)