Summary
“Ruins of a Great House” begins with a quote from the seventeenth-century writer Sir Thomas Browne, describing a setting winter sun. Following this quote, the first stanza of the poem begins by describing a “Great House” which has gone into ruin, and which symbolizes European empire. All that is left of the physical structure of the once great manor are the stones which built it, strewn across the earth for lizards to sharpen their claws against. The cherubs that decorated the gate now sing out with stained mouths, and the wheels of carriages have been sucked underneath the muck which has gathered outside the gate. Three crows settle in the creaking branches of a eucalyptus tree, and the smell of rotting limes fills the air, reminiscent of the rotting of the old empire. The stanza ends with a quotation from Blake, whose words call out goodbye to the “green fields” and “happy groves” which have been replaced by ruin.
The next stanza continues this extended discussion of the decaying empire as a “Great House” in ruin. Its marble was made up of the places its culture lauded: classical Greece, the American South. Yet this beauty was “deciduous”—a term that refers to plants that lose their leaves in the fall—and now it is gone. What is left is the lawn overgrown with rough forest. Below the dead and fallen leaves, animals and humans have rotted down to bone. These dead creatures were never good, but rather come “from evil days, from evil times” (18).
In the third stanza, Walcott returns to the river, on the banks of which the lime trees grew. These were the first crop grown on the manor's grounds. The manor's wealthy, immoral young men and the beautiful young women they pursued are both gone, but the river still flows. The speaker climbs a wall decorated with wrought iron, made by craftsmen now exiled, trying to protect the great house. They may have successfully protected it from guilt, but not from the worms or the mice which gnawed it into ruin. The speaker hears the wind shaking in the limes, and hears it as “the death of a great empire,” a death brought about through the abuse of ignorant people by violence and Christianity (28).
The fourth stanza begins in a “green lawn,” split up by short walls built out of stone. The lawn dips down to the river, and the speaker paces over it thinking of the great poets of the English empire, men who wrote beautifully and murdered on behalf of the empire. Now their memories are muddled, because people aren’t sure whether to remember them for their writing or their crimes. The glorious “green age” which Blake called back to, the height of civilization and cultural achievement, was itself rotting, because it stank of the violence of empire. Its representatives are long dead, but the rot remains. The other remainder is their words, which rise up out of the ashes of empire and burn the eyes of the speaker.
Thus, in the final stanza, the speaker begins full of rage, thinking of the people who were enslaved and killed by the empire whose poetry is so admired. Yet against this anger, the compassion within him reminds him that England too was once a colony, seen as a backwater island on the fringes of Europe, torn up by the cold winds, the foaming English Channel between it and France, the fighting of different factions. He ends not in the anger he expected from himself, but rather with this compassion, this sense that the great manor belonged to a friend.
Analysis
Walcott’s home of Saint Lucia, an island in the Caribbean, was the site of numerous colonization efforts by multiple European powers beginning in the early 1600s. For years, the native Carib people successfully fought off the British. The island was eventually purchased from the Caribs by the French in 1651. Immediately, the British sent troops in to attempt to take the island for themselves, and the fighting continued until 1814, when the French lost and ceded Saint Lucia to the English. By this point, the colonizers had murdered most of the native Carib people, although there are still people with Carib ancestry on the island. The majority of the population were enslaved Africans, and today most Saint Lucians are Black. Saint Lucia did not become independent until 1979, when it became a member of the British Commonwealth like Australia or Canada.
“Ruins of a Great House” reckons with this long history of brutal colonization, one which also spanned much of the modern history of England. There are really three resonances to the “Great House” which Walcott describes. Most explicitly, it symbolizes the British Empire, once great and now fallen into ruin. Walcott also suggests that the “Great House” can be read specifically as the structure of the English literary canon, the elevation of works by “men like Hawkins, Walter Raleigh, Drake” as the height of poetic achievement. On a literal level, Walcott’s extensive use of imagery to describe the “Great House” brings it vividly into view as a physical structure: a colonial-era mansion on Saint Lucia which has since fallen into ruin.
The first stanza establishes an extended metaphor between the Great House and a body. Referring to its “disjecta membra,” Walcott suggests that the house is like a dismembered corpse. This comparison goes on to inform his reference to the “leprosy of empire” at the end of this stanza; the suggestion is that empire has become a kind of wasting disease afflicting the Great House. This is true in the sense that the fall of the British Empire led to the rotting of structures like the colonial-era mansions on Saint Lucia. However, the bodily metaphor makes that image more moving, as the reader is affected more strongly by the image of a lifeless corpse than that of a crumbling building.
The tension between Walcott’s hatred for colonial empire, and his sympathy for the Great House, is what drives this poem forward. That sympathy is driven by the symbolic resonance of the Great House as the English canon—the history of “great works” which forms the structure of contemporary literary scholarship. In the second stanza, Walcott references Faulkner because in some ways he embodies the tension between loving beautiful work, and recognizing that that work coexists with or reinforces a history of violence. William Faulkner was a Southern writer whose work glorifies the American South, and often centers racist white characters, while Black people are marginalized. At the same time, his prose is profoundly beautiful, and today it creates a mournful sense of a lost past, even if the reality of that past was one of brutal white supremacy. In “Ruins of a Great House,” writers like Faulkner create works of “marble”—beautiful ruins.
This tension is complicated by Walcott’s own investment in the “Great House” of the English canon. As a poet writing in English, he is the heir to the tradition of English poetry whether he likes it or not. More than that, however, “Ruins of a Great House” makes it clear that Walcott is not so much an unwilling inheritor of English poetic tradition, but a troubled lover of the beautiful writing of “men like Hawkins, Walter Raleigh, Drake.” The quotations throughout the poem emphasize that Walcott is not attempting to excise his work from this legacy, but rather wants to visibly and actively intertwine his writing with works composed by colonizers. The ending of the poem quotes from the early modern writer John Donne’s poem “No Man is an Island.” This quotation expresses the central irony of the poem: Saint Lucia is an island, subjugated to a colonial power that it eventually expelled. Yet Walcott cannot be an island; he exists in relation to other people, and he not only recognizes himself in the writing of colonizers, but even finds truth and beauty in what they write.
