Virgin and ape, maid and malevolent Moor, their immortal coupling still halves our world. He is your sacrificial beast, bellowing, goaded, a black bull snarled in ribbons of its blood. And yet, whatever fury girded on that saffron-sunset turban, moon-shaped sword was not his racial, panther-black revenge pulsing her chamber with raw musk, its sweat, but horror of the moon's change, of the corruption of an absolute, like a white fruit
pulped ripe by fondling but doubly sweet.
(from "Goats and Monkeys")
This is what "sound colonial education" amounts to; this is what having "English in me" is all about. With equal right, Walcott could have claimed having in him Greek, Latin, Italian, German, Spanish, Russian, French: because of Homer, Lucretius, Ovid, Dante, Rilke, Machado, Lorca, Neruda, Akhmatova, Mandelstam, Pasternak, Baudelaire, Valery, Apollinaire. These are not influences—they are the cells of his bloodstream, no less so than Shakespeare or Edward Thomas are, for poetry is the essence of world culture. And if world culture feels more palpable among urine- stunted trees through which "a mud path wriggles like a snake in flight," hail to the mud path.
And so Walcott's lyric hero does. Sole guardian of the civilization grown hollow in the center, he stands on this mud path watching how "the fish plops, making rings/ that marry the wide harbour" with "clouds curled like burnt-out papers at their edges" above it, with "telephone wires singing from pole to pole I parodying perspective." In his keensightedness this poet resembles Joseph Banks, except that by setting his eyes on a plant "chained in its own dew" or on an object, he accomplishes something no naturalist is capable of—he animates them. To be sure, the realm needs it, not any less so than does the poet in order to survive there. In any case, the realm pays back, and hence lines like:
Slowly the water rat takes up its reed pen
and scribbles leisurely, the egret
on the mud tablet stamps its hieroglyph . . .
This is more than naming things in the garden—this is also a bit later. Walcott's poetry is Adamic in the sense that both he and his world have departed from Paradise—he, by tasting the fruit of knowledge; his world, by political history.
"Ah brave third world!" he exclaims elsewhere, and a lot more goes into this exclamation than simple anguish or exasperation. This is a comment of language upon a greater than purely local failure of nerves and imagination; a semantic reply to the meaningless and abundant reality, epic in its shabbiness. Abandoned, overgrown airstrips, dilapidated mansions of retired civil servants, shacks covered with corrugated iron, single-stack coastal vessels coughing like "relics out of Conrad," four-wheeled corpses escaped from their junkyard ccmcterics and rattling their hones past condominium pyramids, helpless or corrupt politicos and young ignoramuses trigger-happy to replace them and babbling revolutionary garbage, "sharks with well-pressed fins I ripping we small fry off with razor grins"; a realm where "you bust your brain before you find a book," where if you turn on the radio, you may hear the captain of a white cruise boat insisting that a hurricane-stricken island reopen its duty-free shop no matter what, where "the poor still poor, whatever arse they catch," where one sums up the deal the realm got by saying "we was in chains, but chains made us unite, I now who have, good for them, and who blight, blight," and where "beyond them the firelit mangrove swamps, I ibises practicing for postage stamps."
Whether accepted or rejected, the colonial heritage remains a mesmerizing presence in the West Indies. Walcott seeks to break its spell neither by plunging "into incoherence of nostalgia" for a nonexistent past nor by eking himself a niche in the culture of departed masters (into which he wouldn't fit in the first place because of the scope of his talent). He acts out of the belief that language is greater than its masters or its servants, that poetry, being its supreme version, is therefore an instrument of self-betterment for both; i.e., that it is a way to gain an identity superior to the confines of class, race, or ego. This is just plain common sense; this is also the most sound program of social change there is. But then poetry is the most democratic art —it always starts from scratch. In a sense, a poet is indeed like a bird that chirps no matter what twig it alights on, hoping there is an audience, even if it's only the leaves.
About these "leaves"—lives—mute or sibilant, faded or immobile, about their impotence and surrender, Walcott knows enough to make you look sideways from the page containing:
Sad is the felon's love for the scratched wall, beautiful the exhaustion of old towels, and the patience of dented saucepans seems mortally comic . . .
And you resume the reading only to find:
. . . I know how profound is the folding of a napkin
by a woman whose hair will go white . . .
For all its disheartening precision, this knowledge is free of modernistic despair (which often only disguises one's shaky sense of superiority) and is conveyed in tones as level as its source. What saves Walcott's lines from hysterical pitch is his belief that:
. . . time that makes us objects, multiplies our natural loneliness . . .
which results in the following "heresy":
. . . Gods loneliness moves in His smallest creatures.
No 'leaf," neither up here nor in the tropics, would like to hear this sort of thing, and that's why they seldom clap to this bird's song. Even a greater stillness is bound to follow after:
All of the epics are blown away with leaves, blown with careful calculations 011 brown paper, these were the only epics: the leaves . . .
The absence of response has done in many a poet, and in so many ways, the net result of which is that infamous equilibrium—or tautology—between cause and effect: silence. What prevents Walcott from striking a more than appropriate, in his case, tragic pose is not his ambition but his humility, which binds him and these "leaves" into one tight book: ". . . yet who am I ... under the heels of the thousand I racing towards the exclamation of their single name, I Sauteurs! . . ."
Walcott is neither a traditionalist nor a modernist. None of the available -isms and the subsequent -ists will do for him. He belongs to no "school": there are not so many of them in the Caribbean, save those of fish. One would feel tempted to call him a metaphysical realist, but then realism is metaphysical by definition, as well as the other way around. Besides, that would smack of prose. He can be naturalistic, expressionistic, surrealistic, imagistic, hermetic, confessional—you name it. He simply has absorbed, the way whales do plankton or a paintbrush the palette, all the stylistic idioms the North could offer; now he is on his own, and in a big way.
His metric and genre versatility is enviable. In general, however, he gravitates to a lyrical monologue and to a narrative. That, and the tendency to write in cycles, as well as his verse plays, again suggest an epic streak in this poet, and perhaps it's time to take him up on that. For almost forty years his throbbing and relentless lines kept arriving in the English language like tidal waves, coagulating into an archipelago of poems without which the map of modern literature would effectively match wallpaper. He gives us more than himself or "a world"; he gives us a sense of infinity embodied in the language as well as in the ocean which is always present in his poems: as their background or foreground, as their subject, or as their meter.