I hadn’t seen them for half of the Christmas week,
the egrets, and no one told me why they had gone,
but they are back with the rain now, orange beak,
pink shanks and stabbing head, back on the lawn
where they used to be in the clear, limitless rain
of the Santa Cruz valley, which, when it rains, falls
steadily against the cedars till it mists the plain.
The egrets are the colour of waterfalls,
and of clouds. Some friends, the few I have left,
are dying, but the egrets stalk through the rain
as if nothing mortal can affect them, or they lift
like abrupt angels, sail, then settle again.
Sometimes the hills themselves disappear
like friends, slowly, but I am happier
that they have come back, like memory, like prayer.
(Derek Walcott)
I watch the huge trees tossing at the edge of the lawn
like a heaving sea without crests, the bamboos plunge
their necks like roped horses as yellow leaves, torn
from the whipping branches, turn in an avalanche;
all this before the rain scarily pours from the burst,
sodden canvas of the sky like a hopeless sail,
gusting in sheets and hazing the hills completely
as if the whole valley were a hull outriding the gale
and the woods were not trees but waves of a running sea.
When light cracks and thunder groans as if cursed
and you are safe in a dark house deep in Santa
Cruz, with the lights out, the current suddenly gone,
you think: who’ll house the shivering hawk, and the
impeccable egret and the cloud-coloured heron,
and the parrots who panic in alarm at the fire of dawn ?
(Derek Walcott)
Returning to the poetry of Derek Walcott is a new experience, as it always is with the best poets. It is an ongoing process of discovery and rediscovery, whether the poems are old or new, strange or familiar. In the manner of Yeats’ “images that yet fresh images beget,” it is the enduring quality of the work as well as the infinite nature of poetry that this should happen, and the poets know it.
Two of the best Guyanese poets repeatedly express the experience in their different but similarly metaphysical ways, in reference to craft, thought, vision, landscape, reading, seeing or engagement. Martin Carter in his peculiar fashion describes poetry as “continuing to begin,” and about the interchange involved in the writing and the reading of it he writes: “ever yourself, you are always about /to be yourself in something else ever with me.”
Mark Mcwatt once looked at the Guyanese interior landscape in the early morning mist and saw a poem: “the river next morning/was that inspired page/I had sought to write.” As if discovering it for the first time, he acknowledged “the happy truth/that none of the world’s poems/(or that all of them)/are mine.”
Both of those modern metaphysicals share these qualities of engagement with Walcott. McWatt’s encounter with the landscape has that a spiritually inclusive quality that is not the same in Walcott, but where these poems are concerned, their description becomes incredibly close. Walcott looks at the natural landscape in both of them, moving deep in his metaphor of ageing friends in the first and, becoming more dramatic, counterbalances moving images of a ravaging storm with the concept of solace and comfort in the second.
The Times Literary Supplement recently carried ‘Four Poems by Derek Walcott’ (two of which are reproduced here), that have the qualities of both the old and the new, very relevant to the notion of rediscovery mentioned above. One is dedicated to August Wilson, American playwright responsible for famous plays including Fences and The Piano Lesson. Another describes workmen labouring on the waterfront. Both have references to the past and Walcott’s memories of his native St Lucia. The former interrogates music and carries a reference to St Lucia’s Morne Fortune. The latter goes further back to the impressions of the poet as a boy in Castries.
The other two, which are reproduced above, relate to more recent times, or are timeless, but the poet is still reflecting on past impressions. This time they recall his impressions of Trinidad, where he lived from 1960 to 1978 or thereabouts. The one direct reference to that country in both is their setting in the picturesque and leafy Santa Cruz valley and its characteristic rains. Walcott dedicated much of his early poetry to the glorification of the West Indies and their natural wealth, and much, much later, in works such as The Bounty he returns when the elegaic quality brought on by memories of his mother allows some further reflections on his native land.
He plays a double-time in the first poem with the return of the egrets. The persona is looking out at the birds and observing them among the rain, the cedars and the valley. But the poem also allows the poet to play on his memory of the place and reflect on fading friends. He loses them through time, age, neglect and separation, but the memory comes back and has never left. He contrasts it to the egrets and the valley which are vibrant and seem not to be subjected to mortality.
The landscape is the same in the second selection, though the mood and reflections are different, though similar. While the first poem is placid, disturbed only by the light, perpetual drizzle, the second is much more violent. This time the valley is buffeted by a rainstorm, there is high wind, thunder and lightning and it is dark night with the electricity gone in a black-out.
Walcott’s power of description is sharp, perceptive, creating a sense of violent movement and its visual imprint. Then, just as he reflects on the “dying” friends in the first selection, his thoughts seek comfort in the stormy second. In contrast to the mood of the winds in the valley, his thoughts move to safety and protection.
In both poems, the poet is preoccupied with some sustaining force, be it friendship, companionship provided by the return and reassuring presence of the birds as against his departing friends, or the safety of a “dark house deep” in the Santa Cruz valley. He wishes to preserve those things like the hawk and the egret who he likes to think mortality cannot affect. He wishes the same for other things, like memory, or himself.
