Dear Bruce,
that is an interesting observation... I'm not entirely sure that "racism" can be applied the way we use it to an Englishman in 1611. That is, as a systemic, internalized, and institutionalized belief in racial superiority/inferiority, etc.
And actually, Burton is quite forward-thinking. He doesn't seem to hold any belief in racial inferiority that I can discern. (And has very "progressive" attitudes towards women, by the way, seeing them very much as human beings, with complex needs for their own happiness, including intellectual stimulation .) His book is about unhappiness and the human condition. Thus, he is appalled at slavery, and the Spanish treatment of American Indians and Africans as beasts of burden. Indeed, as he does not refer to black Africans as black men in his prose, but as African negroes, I am not entirely convinced that "black men" here in the poem even IS racial--perhaps it is black figures of men, black shapes, what have you. He does not seem to find Africans threatening or frightening in the book. And the list here is of hallucinations and bugbears, not real things he might encounter. (OK, apes are real things, but not anything he would encounter in England. Whereas there were people of African descent, however few and far between, in England.)
I have been thinking about the line, though, particularly about the headless bears. A headless bear appears in another, very different, poem about madness. I wonder if there could be any connection?
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