My race began as the sea began,
with no nouns, and with no horizon,
with pebbles under my tongue,
with a different fix on the stars.
In this first stanza of “Names,” Walcott compares nature, race, and language. The speaker describes a beginning without boundaries. The sea had no horizon, or, in other words, there was no obvious difference between the sea and the sky or the land. Walcott ties this image to language by stating that the sea also began “with no nouns.” By comparing this lack of nouns to a lack of horizon, he emphasizes that nouns work by differentiating types of objects from each other—they create boundaries between things, just like the horizon creates a boundary between the sea and the sky. Many postcolonial critics have argued that Western philosophy often focuses on creating and defining categories. Often, these categories are then sorted into a hierarchy; for example, the body is distinguished from and subordinated to the mind, even though our brains are really part of our bodies. Walcott is picking up this idea to suggest that there was a time when his race was free of these strict categories.
These palms are greater than Versailles,
for no man made them,
their fallen columns greater than Castille,
no man unmade them
except the worm, who has no helmet,
but was always the emporer
Throughout his poetry, Walcott argues for the superiority of the natural world over architecture. In this stanza from the second half of “Names,” he argues that the palm trees are greater than the famous French palace of Versailles because they were not manufactured. In order to justify colonialism, Europeans often argued that colonized people were failing to take advantage of their land by not developing it. Walcott turns this logic on its head by instead suggesting that undeveloped land is actually superior. However, by the end of this stanza, Walcott also begins to challenge the differentiation between man and nature. His phrase “no man [...] / except the worm” implies that the worm is itself a man, just like the men who made Versailles. By referring to the worm as a man, Walcott emphasizes that human beings are not the only beings capable of making things, and hence that the very idea of undeveloped land is suspect. He goes even further by calling the worm the “emporer.” The French kings who built Versailles and Castille imagined themselves as all-powerful. Walcott suggests that really, they were no more powerful than the worm which shapes the earth beneath our feet.
Marble like Greece, like Faulkner’s South in stone,
Deciduous beauty prospered and is gone
In this quotation from “Ruins of a Great House,” Walcott muses on the transience of art and beauty. The word “marble” metonymically refers to the great house as a whole. Although made of stone, the mansion ultimately disappeared just like the leaves on a deciduous tree when winter arrives. By comparing the mansion to a deciduous tree, Walcott suggests that the disappearance of its beauty was natural, part of the progression of time just like the changing of the seasons. Walcott refers to the physical materials of the great house, but he is also speaking about ideas here. Along with comparing the house to a tree, he also compares it to “Greece” and to “Faulkner’s South.” By referring to Greece as a whole, rather than a specific classical object, Walcott calls up antiquity as an idea. Although the Greek empire ended centuries ago, it lives on as an important part of the myth of “Western history.” For example, despite lacking any direct historical connection to the Greeks, the British often portrayed themselves as inheritors of classical ideas in order to justify violent domination of the rest of the world. The American author William Faulkner, who wrote about the American South, similarly used art to extend a fallen empire into the present. Walcott suggests that not only colonialism’s physical structures, but also its ideas, will naturally disappear.
And when a wind shook in the limes I heard
What Kipling heard, the death of a great empire, the abuse
Of ignorance by Bible and by sword.
As “Ruins of a Great House” moves towards its conclusion, Walcott increasingly depicts himself as inextricably intertwined with British colonial writers. Rudyard Kipling was a nineteenth-century British author who often wrote about empire. Some critics have identified Kipling's work as straightforwardly justifying empire, while others have understood him as more critical of British colonialism. Regardless, he worked within the British empire, and for a British audience; his work was never intended to speak to someone like Derek Walcott. Nevertheless, Walcott believes that Kipling accurately observed that the empire was in a state of decline. When Walcott observes the results of that decline—his island left only with the ruins of colonial structure—he hears Kipling’s voice.
Ablaze with rage I thought,
Some slave is rotting in this manorial lake,
But still the coal of my compassion fought
That Albion too was once
A colony like ours, ‘part of the continent, piece of the main’,
Nook-shotten, rook o’erblown, deranged
In the beginning of the last stanza of “Ruins of a Great House,” the speaker is internally conflicted. On the one hand, he thinks with rage of the “slave…rotting in this manorial lake.” Throughout the poem, he has dwelled on the ruins of the house, and used the image of rotting to describe the fruits decaying around the house. Here, the speaker shifts to think about the actual people who were harmed by this ruined house. The image of one specific slave rotting in the lake stands in for Walcott’s knowledge that the whole structure of the house, and of colonial England as a whole, was founded on the hidden labor of enslaved people who are now dead and written out of history. This knowledge pushes him to reject the great house, the empire it represents, and the literature which accompanied it.
Yet the speaker also feels “the coal of [his] compassion” fight back. This compassion is not for the slave, but instead for the slavers: it reminds him that Albion, or England, was itself once a Roman colony. That marginalization actually informed the work of canonical British writers like John Donne, who wrote the poem “No Man is an Island,” from which this stanza quotes repeatedly. Ultimately, “Ruins of a Great House” contains significant ambiguity. Walcott would be entirely justified in feeling only rage towards the British, but he is also driven by compassion, because it is impossible to completely separate the British from himself.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,
the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.
The final stanzas of “Love After Love” complicate an initially simple poem. The poem begins with a simple metaphorical scenario, in which the addressee invites the part of themself they have forgotten back into their life. In that metaphor, the addressee and their true self are two distinct individuals, sharing a meal together. However, here the two figures collapse into one another. Instead of sharing food together, the addressee becomes the only character in the poem, and they sit down alone to “feast” on their life. Through this shift, Walcott emphasizes the strange implications of this poem’s opening scenario: in welcoming the self back, the addressee is still understanding themself as internally divided. To become a truly unified person, they must engage in what feels almost like a strange act of cannibalism: not only remembering but ingesting their own life in order to take back what they had rejected.
Dust rises easily.
Haze of the Harmattan, Sahara dust, memory’s haze
from the dried well of Africa, the headland’s desert 10
or riders in swirling burnooses, mixed with the greys
of hills veiled in Impressionist light.
In this quote from the opening stanzas of “Becune Point,” the speaker associates the landscape of St. Croix with two distant ideas. Seeing the dust rising from the ground, he thinks of the “haze of the Harmattan,” a West African weather pattern in which December through February are dry months punctuated by dust storms. This haze of dust becomes a metaphor for “memory’s haze.” The speaker’s memory of West Africa is shrouded in a haze like a cloud of dust, because colonialism has disrupted his connection to his ancestry. Having been stolen from home by slavers, many of the people of St. Croix do not have information about their own specific ethnic origins, and must resort to vague images of what it might have been like.
This hazy memory of West Africa is contrasted with the speaker’s second association, between the landscape and European Impressionist painting. The association with Impressionism makes it more difficult for the speaker to see the St. Lucian hills as they really are, because he instead perceives them through the lens of how Europeans have portrayed them. By portraying “Impressionist light” as a veil, Walcott contrasts it against his memories of West Africa, which are veiled. Although both sets of associations make it difficult to see the landscape, European colonization is responsible for partially obscuring both the speaker’s memories of West Africa, and the present-day appearance of the St. Lucian hills.
With this blue I bless
emptiness where these hills are barren of tributes
and the repetitions of power, our sky’s naive
ceiling without domes and spires, an earth whose roots
like the thorned acacia’s deepen my belief.
By the end of “Becune Point,” the speaker is able to throw off both sets of associations which conceal the landscape of St. Lucia. Looking up at the blue sky above him, he at first associates it with the European archetypal image of the vault of heaven. Yet he rejects the “domes and spires” which accompany this image of the sky as part of divine architecture. Instead, he celebrates its emptiness. Through the emptiness of the sky, he is also able to “bless” the emptiness of the land, which has thrown off the “repetitions of power” which enabled the British colonial regime to persist. Instead, by centering the naivety of the empty sky, which doesn’t remind Walcott of anything but itself, he is able to extend that sensibility to the whole natural world. The “thorned acacias,” which reach towards the sky while their roots stretch into the dirt, epitomize that new way of looking. By the end of the poem, the speaker’s deepening belief doesn’t need to be in anything, any more than the sky needs to represent “domes and spires.” Walcott suggests that the joy of deep belief can be in the feeling of believing itself, just as the acacia tree grows for no purpose but its own growth.
At the end of this sentence, rain will begin.
At the rain's edge, a sail.
The opening stanza of “Map of the New World” is tricky. Walcott is setting up an allegory in which a poem is represented by a ship at sea. This comparison emphasizes that the poem has a visual appearance on the page. The first line, “at the end of this sentence, rain will begin” makes more sense if we picture the sentence as existing in space: the sentence ends with a period, and that period marks the boundary of a rainstorm. The poem sails right at the edge of this storm, neither engulfed by it nor wholly free of it.
The ten-years war is finished.
Helen's hair, a grey cloud.
Troy, a white ashpit
by the drizzling sea.
The third stanza of “Map of the New World” alludes to the Iliad and the Odyssey, two famous Greek epic poems. In the original story, Greece invades Troy in order to take back Helen, a beautiful princess who ran away with the prince of Troy. The war takes ten years, but eventually ends with the Greeks destroying the city of Troy. After the war, Odysseus, one of the great Greek generals, upsets the gods, who take revenge by delaying his journey home. It ultimately takes Odysseus another ten years to get back to his homeland. The traditional framing of the story doesn’t leave a lot of room to think about Troy: once the Greeks win, we leave Troy behind to follow Odysseus’s journey. Here, Walcott shifts that focus, by emphasizing that the “ten-years war” left Troy a wasteland. Additionally, he asserts Helen’s humanity by depicting her as aged; in the traditional framing of the story, she is just a beautiful woman who causes the war and then ceases to matter. Walcott thus positions his own poetry as the poetry of marginalized and defeated Troy, rather than that of victorious Greece.
