The jet bores like a silverfish through volumes of cloud –
clouds that will keep no record of where we have passed,
nor the sea’s mirror, nor the coral busy with its own
culture; they aren’t doors of dissolving stone,
but pages in a damp culture that come apart.
So a hole in their parchment opens, and suddenly, in a vast
dereliction of sunlight, there’s that island known
to the traveller Trollope, and the fellow traveller Froude,
for making nothing. Not even a people. The jet’s shadow
ripples over green jungles as steadily as a minnow
through seaweed. Our sunlight is shared by Rome
and your white paper, Joseph. Here, as everywhere else,
it is the same age. In cities, in settlements of mud,
light has never had epochs. Near the rusty harbor
around Port of Spain bright suburbs fade into words –
Maraval, Diego Martin – the highways long as regrets,
and steeples so tiny you couldn’t hear their bells,
nor the sharp exclamations of whitewashed minarets
from green villages. The lowering window resounds
over pages of earth, the canefields set in stanzas.
Skimming over an ocher swamp like a fast cloud of egrets
are nouns that find their branches as simply as birds.
It comes too fast, this shelving sense of home –
canes rushing the wing, a fence; a world that still stands as
the trundling tires keep shaking and shaking the heart.
The stanza and the emotion, as well as the imagination ranging throughout time and place, are contained not by meter but by rhyme – cloud/Froude/mud; passed/vast; own/stone/known; apart/heart; shadow/minnow; Rome/home; words/birds; regrets/minarets/egrets; bells/else; stands as/stanzas; the only two words not finding any company in even the slightest rhyme are harbor and resounds. Because of the immense topic he commences upon in this first stanza the boundary of rhyme is necessary; without it the stanza, and the series of poems as a whole would appear as just lines without any definition or even virtue. Yes, virtue, for the belief in and obedience to rhyme or any traditional form displays to the reader a sense of humility and obeisance on the poet’s part to the language that is larger and older than himself. It is similar to the worshipper humbly praying to God; the supplicant’s ego or personality is present yet he realizes that he must approach the Godhead in the attitude of humility and that he realizes himself fully only when he realizes himself in God, realizing his full potential and identity only after dying away in God Who fills the supplicant with Himself. But it is not merely that the supplicant’s identity is erased, because his uniqueness is not erased; rather, it is the selfish ego that is erased whereas the individuality is retained.
It is often said that the societies of the West Indian islands lack any history, and therefore lack any significant culture they can call their own. Without going too far off of my theme, an objection to this common belief of the lack of history must be raised. History in the Caribbean does not begin at the end of the fifteenth century; the native history goes back centuries; but the cultural history, that with which the late Trinidadian writer C.L.R. James and others are concerned, is a continuation of and is one of the branches in the long history of Europe and Africa. Those who settled in the West Indies from Britain, Spain, France, Portugal, etc., and those who were brought over from Africa as slaves, and those indentured from Asia following emancipation, even those from the Middle East, all brought with them their cultural traditions and over time, as they have blended together, for the most part harmoniously, a new culture was given birth in each island. Our heritage is undoubtedly linked to theirs; and in a nation like Trinidad and Tobago, as well as other English-speaking islands, the culture and history is shaped, influenced and defined by the achievements of the British Empire and the simple fact that English is the national language, the language of Marlowe, Kyd, Shakespeare, Milton and so many others; also by the form of government, parliamentary democracy. Contemporary Trinidadians can look back hundreds of years for a tradition.
In his famous book on cricket, Beyond a Boundary, the late Trinidadian author C.L.R. James wrote (and it must be quoted in his own words), when explicating the intimate relationship between cricket and West Indian social and political life, and the reaction of the crowd in the Queen’s Park Oval on 30th January 1960 when they threw bottles on to the field during a match between the West Indies and the Marylebone Cricket Club (M.C.C.) team from England as they deeply believed that one of the local players received an unjust judgment against him from a local umpire (local umpires were seen as being harsher on the local players): "West Indians crowding to Tests bring with them the whole past history and future hopes of the islands. English people, for example, have a conception of themselves breathed from birth. Drake and mighty Nelson, Shakespeare, Waterloo, the Charge of the Light Brigade, the few who did so much for so many, the successes of parliamentary democracy, those and such as those constitute a national tradition. Underdeveloped countries have to go back centuries to rebuild one. We of the West Indies have none at all, none that we know of."
Cricket defined a people who believed they had no history they can claim, even a game that was born in the culture and country of the colonizers. Cricket gave the people character, and because their society has given birth to talented players who excel at this game created by the colonizers, challenging and even triumphing against the game’s creators, the populace seek a sort of refuge in it and desire that it be played according to the rules that are in place to ensure fairness and equality on the field, a fairness and equality they saw as lacking in life outside of cricket.
The literary tradition that existed in Walcott's own country, and in the West Indies as a whole, can fairly said to have commenced in the early twentieth century, two of the leading figures being St.-John Perse and Aimé Cesairé; yet this tradition has its roots in the European literary tradition. His understanding of this is what makes Walcott aware of his own place, i.e. a twentieth-century West Indian writer writing on a Caribbean island whose verses and the language he employs are connected to and connects him to Rome, and Brodsky (another poet loyal to traditional forms), under shared sunlight; and there is no attempt at all to attain that heresy of Originality. A poet is original only in the sense of personal experience, yet even these experiences, because they are human experiences are universal and timeless, thus connecting our contemporary suffering selves to those suffering selves throughout history; and the originality of a poet shows in the language he uses to describe those experiences/imaginings/desires into verse, using a language that is his own diction, while at the same time it has been used for centuries, though the dialect might be different, even if only fifty years apart from him. Because of this historical sense, no poet can ever strive to be Original; he will only end in implosion.
“Our sunlight is shared by Rome/and your white paper, Joseph[,]” and here is the shared sunlight of the antique act of writing poetry (that connects Walcott – and Brodsky – to their poetic predecessors), thus showing Walcott’s sense, not only of his times, but also of those in his time. To use the line again, “Wherever a thought can go back seventy years/there is hope for tradition in these tropical islands[,]” along with the use of rhyme, is Walcott’s refutation of both Trollope and Froude, and others who say that the West Indies lacks culture. “There’s that island known/to the traveller Trollope, and the fellow traveller Froude,/ for making nothing. Not even a people.” Yet, by the very act of using rhyme and the making of a poem, there is evidence that the West Indies has given birth to a culture that is original in its own way, while connected to the Old World (“Our sunlight is shared by Rome"), thus there is tradition; and using rhyme as a limiting force to guide his poem, Walcott gives a shape to a culture that is, like all others, organic and formless by nature.
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