Second Early Afrikaans Poem (Public Domain)

The poem here is "Dis al" ("That's All") by Jan F.E. Celliers (1865–1940), one of the three great poets of the post-Anglo-Boer-War generation alongside Marais and Totius. Celliers died in 1940 — eighty-six years ago — so the poem is in the public domain and can be quoted in full. Placed beside Marais's "Winternag", it reveals the shared stylistic grammar of early Afrikaans verse: the same metre-driven inversion, the same extreme compression, the same trust that a reader will rebuild the clauses the poet has dismantled. Where Marais paints a whole winter landscape, Celliers strips his scene down to almost nothing — which makes the ellipsis even starker.

The poem

Dis die blond, dis die blou: dis die veld, dis die lug; en 'n voël draai bowe in eensame vlug — dis al.

Dis 'n balling gekom oor die oseaan, dis 'n graf in die gras, dis 'n vallende traan — dis al.

A working gloss:

The speaker is a returning Boer prisoner-of-war looking at his ravaged homeland. He cannot describe it in full sentences; he can only point — that... that... that — at colours, a bird, a grave, a tear, and then stop: dis al, "that's all". The grammar of the poem is its grief: language broken down to bare deixis.

Dis: the worn-down hinge of the whole poem

Eight of the eleven lines begin with dis, a contraction of dit is ("it is / that is"). This is the same clitic reduction English makes in "it's", and in modern Afrikaans dis is a normal, slightly informal everyday word (Dis warm vandag — "It's hot today"). Celliers takes that ordinary contraction and turns it into a structural drumbeat: each dis fronts a new fragment, and the repetition (anaphora) hammers the pointing gesture home.

Crucially, dis die blond is a cleft-like presentation: it does not say "the field is blond" but rather "it is the blond [that I see]". The little dis lets the poet name a quality and present it as the sole content of perception, with no full predication. That presentational shading is exactly what a learner should hear — and it is the same device that powers casual Afrikaans sentences like Dis hý wat dit gedoen het ("It's he who did it"), discussed under focus and fronting.

Metre-driven inversion: en 'n voël draai bowe

The single full sentence in the first stanza shows the period's love of inversion bent to the metre. Prose would order it 'n voël draai bowe in 'n eensame vlug — and Celliers keeps that core, but the placement of bowe ("above") before the place-phrase, and the bare in eensame vlug without an article, are both metrical economies.

Note eensame vlug with no 'n before it. Everyday prose would say in 'n eensame vlug ("in a lonely flight"). Dropping the article is a compression the metre demands and the elevated register permits — bare singular nouns after a preposition are a recognisable poetic licence. The adjective still takes its attributive -e (eensaam → eensame) because that ending is grammatically obligatory before a noun, metre or no metre; the rules for that -e are on the literary style page and, in full, under attributive -e.

Archaic compression: 'n balling gekom

The densest line is dis 'n balling gekom oor die oseaan — literally "it's an exile come across the ocean". A modern writer would supply a relative clause and a perfect auxiliary: dis 'n balling wat oor die oseaan gekom het ("it's an exile who has come across the ocean"). Celliers deletes wat (the relative pronoun) and het (the perfect auxiliary) and welds the bare past participle gekom straight onto the noun.

This participle-as-reduced-relative — "a man come from afar", "a letter written long ago" — is an old, elevated construction. English preserves a faint version of it ("an exile come across the sea", "the road taken"), which is the closest a translation can get; but in modern Afrikaans prose it is firmly literary and you would almost always restore the full wat... het clause. The everyday perfect with het and ge- is described under the past with ge-; here the poem is precisely avoiding it. The vocabulary is raised too — balling ("exile, banished one") is a literary, slightly archaic word for which ordinary speech would use banneling or just vlugteling.

Radical ellipsis and the refrain dis al

The poem's whole architecture is ellipsis: not one finite verb of the main "seeing" is ever stated. We are given the contents of a gaze — colours, a bird, a grave, a tear — and the refrain dis al ("that's all") twice draws a line under the list. Dis al is itself elliptical: dit is al [wat daar is], "that is all [that there is]". The unspoken [wat daar is] is the desolation the speaker cannot bring himself to spell out.

The present participle in 'n vallende traan ("a falling tear") deserves a final note. Vallend ("falling"), from val, takes the attributive -e to become vallende and sits before the noun like an adjective — a reduced version of the clause 'n traan wat val ("a tear that falls"). Present participles as attributives are markedly more literary in Afrikaans than in English; in speech a relative wat-clause is far more usual. So even this small phrase carries the elevated, compressed grammar that the whole period shares — the same instinct you saw in Marais's versprei in die brande ("scattered among the burnt patches"). Two poems, one stylistic grammar.

Common mistakes

Key takeaways

• "Dis al" (Celliers, 1865–1940) is public-domain and can be quoted in full.
• Dis (= dit is) is an everyday contraction the poet turns into structural anaphora; each dis presents a fragment with no full predication.
• Metre-driven inversion and article-dropping (in eensame vlug) are licences the period grants poetry, never modern prose.
• Archaic compression welds a bare participle onto a noun ('n balling gekom = 'n balling wat... gekom het), deleting wat and het.
• Radical ellipsis — no main verb of seeing, the doubled refrain dis al trailing off into the unsaid — is the shared stylistic grammar early Afrikaans verse has in common with Marais's "Winternag".