‘Enter the Reluctant Leopard’
Poetry as an Alternative Construction of the Caribbean
in Derek Walcott’s ‘Prelude’
Poetry as an Alternative Construction of the Caribbean
in Derek Walcott’s ‘Prelude’
L.Gilbert –
26.8.2013
It is worth remembering that
‘Prelude’, from In a Green Night, is the
poem of a very young man. Walcott was just “sixteen or seventeen” when he wrote
it. Nevertheless, it is interesting in that it introduces (as its title
suggests) a number of themes that become significant in the rest of Walcott’s
oeuvre. As Rita Dove has suggested, Walcott’s concerns “haven’t changed much”
over his many years as a writer. Rather, he is a poet of “circling and
deepening”. In particular, this early poem serves to illustrate Walcott’s love
of and debt to English poetry and his early engagement with the nature of
Caribbean experience, particularly in terms of the effects of their economic
reliance on tourism.
Walcott has noted how the poem
was written at the same time as he was discovering the work of T.S.Eliot.
Indeed, the extent of Eliot’s influence on this particular poem is an interesting
and revealing line of inquiry. Eliot’s ‘Preludes’ – note the intersection of
the titles – from the 1920 collection Prufrock and Other Observations seems a particularly apt starting point.
Just as Eliot’s collection is a
series of observations, so too Walcott’s
early poem begins with the assertion “I … watch”. Eliot focuses on a city-scape
under a winter sky at the end of a “smoky day” as “a gusty shower” … beat[s] on
broken blinds and chimney pots”. Similarly, Walcott watches:
The variegated fists of clouds that gather over
The uncouth features of this, my prone island.
Walcott’s observing gaze seems to
perceive St. Lucia in much the same way that Eliot perceives his London street.
Both seem – to their respective viewers – visually unappealing and vulnerable
beneath a gathering shroud of violent weather.
In contrast, Walcott’s ‘Prelude’
goes on to describe ‘eyes / that have known cities’ - eyes much like Eliot’s – looking at St. Lucia through
‘ardent binoculars’ from distant ‘steamers’. It is of note that these
city-dwellers – (British?) tourists – arriving in the Caribbean on their cruise
ships seem blinded by a superficial ‘blue reflection’ and believe the
inhabitants of the island must be ‘happy’ away from the sort of ‘grimy scraps
of withered leaves’, ‘newspapers’, ‘stale smells of beer’, ‘dingy shades’ and
‘lonely cab-horses’ that populate Eliot’s London. In such a view of the
Caribbean one hears the ghostly echo of Andrew Marvel’s poem ‘Bermudas’ that,
in turn, gives Walcott’s collection its title:
He hangs in shades the orange bright
Like golden lamps in a green night
And does in the pom’ganates close
Jewels more rich than Ormus shows.
For Christopher O’Reilly, it is
through literature such as this that “the myth of the New World as a place of
untainted, rural innocence was being constructed in the European imagination”.
What Walcott’s early ‘Prelude’ appears to reveal is that this constructed perception of the Caribbean in the European imagination has
lingered long into the twentieth century and beyond.
Walcott’s project in this poem
appears to be to highlight the difference between the perceptions of the
Caribbean held by its distant visitors on their cruise ship and the way that he
feels as an inhabitant of the region – at one with it – with his ‘legs crossed
along the daylight’ itself. Perhaps unsurprisingly, his feelings seem to echo
those of Eliot’s about London. Just as Eliot’s London is populated by ‘muddy
feet that press / To early coffee stands’, so Walcott’s St. Lucia is populated
by ‘living images / of flesh that saunter through the eye’. Just as a London
morning begins with ‘masquerades / that time resumes’ or Prufrock admits the
need to ‘prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet’, so too Walcott admits
to going ‘through all the isolated acts’, explaining how he will ‘straighten
[his] tie and fix important jaws’. Just as Eliot’s ‘worlds revolve like ancient
women / gathering fuel in vacant lots’, so Walcott expresses a feeling that
‘time creeps over the patient’ and his ‘boyhood has gone over’.
Ultimately this poem can be seen
as a first effort to counter the fact that Walcott’s beloved Caribbean home is
(he feels) “found only / in tourist booklets” – an image which appears to
bemoan the lack of any serious literature through which the Caribbean can write
itself into significance and define itself into being. We might therefore
describe ‘Prelude’ as a first attempt at self-definition, trying (perhaps a
little unsuccessfully, tinged as the poem is by something akin to teenage angst
and an over reliance on Eliot as a model) to provide an alternative vision of
the Caribbean to the stereotypes that European literature and Caribbean
marketing material have perpetuated.
Even now, in 2013, one can easily
find the sort of ‘tourist booklets’ that a young Walcott seems to be so at odds
with in 1948:
Mix the stunning
natural scenery of St Lucia with near-perfect weather, total relaxation and
plenty of fun and you’ll have the perfect recipe for a very special holiday in
the Caribbean. Shaped rather like a mango the island of St Lucia is just 14
miles wide and 27 miles long, has lots of sandy beaches, a scenic mountainous
landscape and thick lush rainforests, sheltered white sand beaches and quaint
fishing villages.
No variegated fists of clouds
gathering over the uncouth features of this prone island. No inhabitants
tempting by the idea of a ‘knife turning / in the bowels’ either. Only vacuous
tranquillity and ripe fruit, oranges like ‘golden lamps’; ‘pom’ganates’ filled
with ‘jewels’.
In this early poem from 1948 seem
to be the first seeds of an idea expounded – circled and deepened, perhaps – in
Walcott’s Nobel lecture of 1992. I will quote it at length:
In our tourist brochures the
Caribbean is a blue pool into which the republic dangles the extended foot of
Florida as inflated rubber islands bob and drinks with umbrellas float towards
her on a raft. This is how the islands from the shame of necessity sell
themselves; this is the seasonal erosion of their identity, that high-pitched
repetition of the same images of service that cannot distinguish one island
from the other. …
There is a territory wider than
this - wider than the limits made by the map of an island - which is the
illimitable sea and what it remembers.
All of the Antilles, every island, is an effort of memory;
every mind, every racial biography culminating in amnesia and fog. Pieces of
sunlight through the fog and sudden rainbows, arcs-en-ciel. That is the
effort, the labour of the Antillean imagination, rebuilding its gods from
bamboo frames, phrase by phrase.
In many ways, the purpose of this
section of ‘The Antilles: Fragments of Epic Memory’ seems strikingly similar to
his purpose in ‘Prelude’: he bemoans the ‘erosion’ of the Caribbean identity
into mere ‘images’ – ‘blue reflections’ in a Green night, as it were – and then
seeks to supply an alternative vision. Only this time, the alternative is not
filled with angst and borrowed ideas from Eliot – he asserts instead that the
Caribbean identity can be found – or
rather must be constructed out of – ‘what [the sea] remembers’, seemingly a
reference to the Middle Passage; a reading of the amnesia of the mixed racial
biographies that form the region as an opportunity rather than an agony; the
beauty of their landscape, weather and dazzling combinations of creoles (I can
say both rainbows and arcs-en-ciel,
how fortunate I am, he seems to cry); and
the traditions, myths, gods, literature that they choose to (re)construct for
themselves, ‘phrase by phrase’ – poem by poem.
Or perhaps I’m being reductive to
suggest that Walcott wasn’t already on his way to this resolution as a young
poet. Let us turn, finally, to the last stanza of ‘Prelude’:
Until from all I turn to think
how,
In the middle of the journey through my life
O how I came upon you, my
reluctant leopard of the slow eyes.
This seems to me a hugely obscure
passage in which one senses a young poet straining to be difficult. What we can
assert, however, is that it narrates a discovery of something new that Walcott
feels the need to address directly with a prayer-like tone of reverence – ‘O
… you’ – because it seems to provide him
with an alternative to all the pain and emptiness that ‘Prelude’ has detailed
thus far. A register of words like ‘Lost’, ‘Gone’, ‘Suffer’ and ‘Isolated’ have
been the order of the day until this final stanza, then enter the reluctant
leopard and all seems well.
Walcott has written of this poem
that it was composed at a time when:
I was very excited
about my discovery, through several older people, of the poetry of W.H. Auden,
T.S. Eliot, and Dylan Thomas—physical books that I had, books whose print I
liked (my emphasis).
