Derek Walcott: Collected Poems Essay Questions

Compare and contrast the imagery in “Ruins of a Great House” and “Becune Point.” How do these differences inform the themes of both poems?

In both “Ruins of a Great House” and “Becune Point,” Walcott uses extensive imagery to describe the landscape of St. Lucia. “Becune Point” begins with a lengthy description of Becune Point itself, with Walcott dwelling on the harshness of the landscape, as well as the many living things that inhabit it. “Ruins of a Great House” similarly employs visual imagery, metaphor, and simile to describe the things growing around the Great House. Furthermore, both poems combine close observation of the natural world with descriptions of crumbling architecture. However, in “Ruins of a Great House,” that architecture is the center of the poem. Its ruin is echoed by the rotting of natural things like the limes, and ultimately serves to parallel the symbolic decay of the British empire. In contrast, in “Becune Point” the crumbling architecture is contrasted against the natural world, rather than paralleled with it. There, the most important idea is that the natural world exists as a lively and meaningful place beyond the lifespan of man-made structures.

Describe the allegory Walcott uses in “Map of the New World.” What does it allow him to say about poetry?

In “Map of the New World,” Derek Walcott compares a poem to a ship at sea. By extending this metaphor throughout the poem, he is able to write a fairly complex narrative, in which the poem is at first caught up in a rainstorm, but is eventually able to find its way home. This allegory provides a visual image that can represent the difficulty of discovering a creative voice as a writer from a formerly colonized country. The sea comes to represent the English canon: a loud and expansive body of work that threatens to drown out any subversive voices. However, by navigating back to the island of St. Lucia, Walcott is able to find a poetic voice within English that still pushes back against colonial power.

Choose one poem and discuss the theme of writing in English as a postcolonial poet. Draw directly from the text to make your argument.

In “Names,” Derek Walcott uses English as a proxy for the broader difficulties of recovering cultural identity in the wake of colonial violence. The poem begins by considering the relationship between grammar and the ways people relate to their surroundings. Declaring “my race began as the sea began, / with no nouns, and with no horizon,” Walcott emphasizes that the grammatical features of English, like nouns, are culturally specific rather than universal. By drawing a parallel between a lack of nouns and a lack of horizons, Walcott suggests that nouns function to draw boundaries between different parts of the world. In a world without nouns, he goes on, his race could begin “with pebbles under my tongue, / with a different fix on the stars.” Without nouns, he was able to hold pebbles under his tongue. This develops the theme of differentiation by implying that without nouns, the boundaries between the human body and the other parts of the natural world were less defined.

Walcott frequently alludes to other artists and poets in his work. Choose one allusion and analyze it, thinking about its relationship to the poem’s overarching themes.

In “Ruins of a Great House,” Derek Walcott quotes twice from John Donne’s poem “No Man is an Island.” Donne’s poem argues that no one can afford to worry only about themself, because we are all connected to and dependent on one another. Walcott picks up this theme in the final stanza of “Ruins of a Great House,” which makes the parallel suggestion that Walcott, as a poet, cannot afford to isolate himself from the English canon: he is connected to and dependent on it, just like people depend on one another. However, at the same time, Walcott also selects specific quotations from the poem which transform its metaphorical meaning into more literal imagery. By isolating “part of the continent, piece of the main,” Walcott transforms what was originally a metaphorical description of a person into a literal description of Britain, both divided from and connected to the European continent. Similarly, he ends the poem with “as well as if a manor of thy friends.” In the context of “Ruins of a Great House,” Walcott suggests that the great house, the site of so much violence, is also strangely similar to “a manor of thy friends.”

Discuss the final four lines of “Love After Love.” To what extent does it subvert the expectations established by the beginning of the poem?

The final lines of “Love After Love” both reiterate and subvert the expectations established by the beginning of the poem. This divalence relies on the ambiguity of the phrase “take down,” which simultaneously suggests the act of getting rid of something, and the act of taking something off the wall in order to look at it more closely. The elision between destruction and care is amplified by the final line of the poem, “Feast on your life.” On one hand, this line suggests someone finally taking the time to enjoy the fruits of their life. On the other, it suggests a strange kind of cannibalism in which the speaker is asked to ingest everything they’ve created and lived with. The former interpretation builds on the opening of the poem, by illustrating a heightened version of the meal at the beginning of “Love After Love.” Yet the ambiguity of the end of the poem also adds nuance to the message of self-discovery, by emphasizing that really knowing yourself can, paradoxically, demand a certain measure of self-destruction.