Prelude by Derek Walcott

‘Enter the Reluctant Leopard’
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).

Books whose print I liked, he explains, in what seems to be an attempt to clarify the final stanza of ‘Prelude’. Could it be that the young Walcott’s imagination saw in the metaphor of the reluctant leopard a symbol of poetry itself? A thing of great power and beauty that stalks forth reluctantly – revealing its distinctive print – from the landscape of the imagination only after much meditative gazing, observing, watching. If this is so, then it is poetry itself - both those poets he is reading with ‘slow eyes’ and those poems he is summoning forth himself after turning his ‘slow eyes’ to the landscape and situation of his St. Lucian home - that can provide a release from the loss, suffering and isolation that is the Caribbean predicament. Perhaps, then, a sixteen year old Walcott is already beginning to pierce the amnesia and fog (the variegated fists of clouds, the blank erosion of his home into an inflatable rubber island) with an early arcs-en-ciel of imagination: simply by the act of absorbing and reworking the poets of half his heritage, learning to ‘suffer in accurate iambics’, he begins building a tradition for the Caribbean from the imagination, from the landscape itself, from the bamboo frames of Eliot… phrase by phrase by phrase.