though our longest sun sets at right declensions and makes but winter arches, it cannot be long before we lie down in darkness, and have our light in ashes…
Derek Walcott, Ruins of a Great House
Stones only, the disjecta membra of this Great House, Whose moth-like girls are mixed with candledust, Remain to file the lizard’s dragonish claws. The mouths of those gate cherubs shriek with stain; Axle and coach wheel silted under the muck Of cattle droppings. Three crows flap for the trees And settle, creaking the eucalyptus boughs. A smell of dead limes quickens in the nose The leprosy of empire. ‘Farewell, green fields, Farewell, ye happy groves!’
Marble like Greece, like Faulkner’s South in stone, Deciduous beauty prospered and is gone, But where the lawn breaks in a rash of trees A spade below dead leaves will ring the bone Of some dead animal or human thing Fallen from evil days, from evil times.
It seems that the original crops were limes Grown in that silt that clogs the river’s skirt; The imperious rakes are gone, their bright girls gone, The river flows, obliterating hurt. I climbed a wall with the grille ironwork Of exiled craftsmen protecting that great house From guilt, perhaps, but not from the worm’s rent Nor from the padded calvary of the mouse. And when a wind shook in the limes I heard What Kipling heard, the death of a great empire, the abuse Of ignorance by Bible and by sword.
A green lawn, broken by low walls of stone, Dipped to the rivulet, and pacing, I thought next Of men like Hawkins, Walter Raleigh, Drake, Ancestral murderers and poets, more perplexed In memory now by every ulcerous crime. The world’s green age then was rotting lime Whose stench became the charnel galleon’s text. The rot remains with us, the men are gone. But, as dead ash is lifted in a wind That fans the blackening ember of the mind, My eyes burned from the ashen prose of Donne.
Ablaze with rage I thought, Some slave is rotting in this manorial lake, But still the coal of my compassion fought That Albion too was once A colony like ours, ‘part of the continent, piece of the main’, Nook-shotten, rook o’erblown, deranged By foaming channels and the vain expense Of bitter faction. All in compassion ends So differently from what the heart arranged: ‘as well as if a manor of thy friend’s…’
Browne, Urn Burial
Moving through the remains of a colonial manor, the speaker in ‘Ruins of a Great House’ becomes by turns archeologist, judge and poet-observer. As his excavation and judgment of the past proceeds, there is a growing sense of how deeply imperialist influence has been imbricated with his “text” – his sense of the world and the terms of his reference – even as he seeks to denigrate its evils. In reaching an uneasy reconciliation of these two impulses, he moves towards “compassion” (48) – but uses Donne’s words in place of his own, at the end. The poem is interwoven with the words and ideas of English poets (Donne most significantly, but Blake and Kipling as well), creating a tension between the fundamental antipathy which Walcott expresses towards the colonial project and the form that the expression of this antipathy takes.
Walcott chooses to note the decay and disintegration of the manor, a symbol of the colonialist powers that built it, in the terms of understanding of those very colonialists. Beginning with the condemnation of “evil times” (20) in language evoking nature’s physical reclamation of the manor, Walcott moves towards images and references from the English literary canon. His account combines these two frames of reference.
The natural world, this first frame of reference, is centered on imagery that pursues two main ideas, developing in contrasting directions. The first of these is the condemnation of colonialism. The artifacts of colonialism are likened to a disease and persistently linked to images of rot and death. Again and again the “dead limes” (10), the commercial product of colonialism, are followed immediately by images of death and disease: this first image with “the leprosy of empire” (11), and a later image of “rotting lime” (39) linked to the “ulcerous crime” (38) of slavery. The lime/crime rhyme associates the two concepts. Intermittently rhyming lines in the poem are used to associate the moral condemnation of the colonial legacy with its more tangible products: stone/gone/bone in the second stanza ties the physical remains of the ruined manor to the time of its flourishing, an image of prosperity that is undercut by the dissonance in the half-rhyme of gone/stone/bone and the image of buried “bone[s]” bespeaking the brutality of the colonial project. In the same way the rhyme bridging the second and third stanzas – times/limes – links the “evil days… evil times” (20) of Empire with the limes. The limes hence become a metonym: the commercial product of and a stand-in for Empire, as the manor and its deterioration mirrors the fall of Empire. The use of intermittently reappearing pairs of rhymes further suggests a perverse harmony in the workings of colonialism, highlighting the linked and centrally coordinated cruelties of the period. At the same time the unrhymed lines surrounding these rhymed pairs indicates a refusal of the colonized to submit to the traditional formal constraints – and, more significantly, deliberate attempts to disrupt the fully rhymed pairs. This disruption is evident in the use of half-rhyme in (stone)/Donne/gone in the fourth stanza, the interposition of half rhyme between an otherwise fully rhymed pair of words (next/perplexed/text in the fourth stanza), a fully rhymed pair followed by a half-rhyme (house/mouse/abuse), and the displacement of a potentially fully rhyming pair (ring/thing) in the second stanza by half-rhyme (gone/bone).
The second direction in which the natural imagery develops explores the way in which nature physically breaks down the artifacts of colonialism, described in the terms of invasion or of economic ruin. The image of the “padded cavalry of the mouse” (29), contrasting the smallness of the mouse with the military might of an army, and “worm’s rent” (28), with its simultaneous suggestion of a wearing down and an ironic reversal of the tenant-landlord relation, adds to the sense that the methods of the colonialist are being used against them by nature. The taint of Empire and its deeds extends through the entire edifice of the mansion; every image of the colonial house in the first and second stanzas is associated with unpleasantness. The “gate cherubs shriek with stain” (5), the “axle and coach wheel [are] silted under the muck/Of cattle droppings” (6-7). The onomatopoeic sibilance in “shriek with stain” (5) creates an auditory image of a hostile and ominous atmosphere, contributed to by the “flap[ping]” of crows’ wings and the “creaking … eucalyptus boughs” (8-9).
Images of nature are, in Walcott’s conception, tangled up with the colonial project, as tangible manifestations of its cruelty (limes, the “rash of trees” (17), “the world’s green age” (39)) and as ultimately neutral as between oppressor and oppressed (“deciduous beauty” (16) prospering even in “evil days” (20)). That “[t]he river flows, obliterating hurt” (25) is no real comfort: it is not sympathy but erasure. Nature’s ambivalence mirrors Walcott’s own internally conflicting states – anger and compassion. And the image of the limes is transmuted gradually into an uneasy understanding that aspires towards, but does not quite reach, forgiveness. The persistence of the ash image in the fourth and fifth stanzas allows us to track this sea-change: first the “rotting lime/ Whose stench became the charnel galleon’s text” (39-40) changes into “dead ash” (42). The image of ash recurs in “the blackening ember of the mind” (43) and the “ashen prose of Donne” (44), associating Walcott’s internal state with the terms of understanding he has chosen for it. These images further transform into the “[blaze] of rage” (46) and the “coal of… compassion” (48). The passion of Walcott’s anger (flame) is contrasted with the moribundity of the ash (the remains of fire); this transition from anger into benevolence is mirrored in the softening of the guttural sounds (‘k’) by rounder liquid sounds (‘o’ and ‘l’ in ‘coal’; ‘m’ in ‘compassion’) following them in “coal of compassion”.
Nature, the first frame of reference, is also inextricably tied to the second frame – the language and literature of the colonialist, the words of “[a]ncestral murderers and poets” (37). The recurring images of ash in the fourth stanza end in a pun on Donne – the name suggests ‘dun’, linking Donne, whose words Walcott borrows in the final stanza, with the persisting image of ash. That the “stench” of the “rotting lime… became the charnel galleon’s text” (39-40) further suggests the degree to which Empire has corrupted even its victims’ history and origins, the “text” which records both the suffering in the slave galleons and the conquest by war galleons (‘galleon’, OED).
This threefold concern with death and the artifacts of the past, language, and moral condemnation of the colonial project is evident from the very beginning of the poem. Browne’s ‘Urn Burial’, a melding of the archeological study of ancient funerary custom and a contemplation of mortality, mirrors Walcott’s concerns in this poem. Like Browne, Walcott examines the artifacts of times past – but his observations are colored by the pervading sense of rot and death that hangs over the manor, a reflection of its abominable origins. The degree to which language is tangled up in and implicated by the moral condemnation of the colonialists is clear in the lines of ‘Urn Burial’ which Walcott quotes in the epigraph. “[D]eclensions” (“though our longest sun sets at right declensions”) refers both to a feature of languages – the variation in the form of nouns or verbs – as well as a ‘condition of decline or moral deterioration’ (‘declension’, OED). Walcott slyly hints at the self-reflexivity of the poem in his first description of the ruins of the house as “disjecta membra” (1), a term that invokes both archeological and literary fragments – it references Horace’s disjecti membra poetae, the ‘limbs of a dismembered poet’, and foregrounds Walcott’s own use of extracts from Blake and Donne. Inferable from Horace’s idea is also a visceral tearing to pieces, a notion that operates on multiple levels in Walcott’s poem: the violence and body count of the “charnel galleon” in the past; the gathering of carrion crows in the present ruins of a colonial mansion; self-reflexively, the poem tears apart the cultural artifacts of the colonialist and reassembles them in new forms.
As he pulls the fragments of a decaying manor into the coherence of a poem, Walcott therefore simultaneously takes the disjecta membra of Blake and Donne’s poetry and builds it into his archeological-literary reconstruction. He marks out borrowed words and never integrates them into his own text, instead setting them apart as quotes. He is acutely aware that his perception of the manor and his articulation of that experience are irrevocably permeated by the cultural signifiers of the colonialist. At the same time, he borrows these words to subvert them, altering them to suit his purpose. The Donne/dun pun is one instance of this. In other places he inverts the meaning of the original: “‘Farewell, green fields/ Farewell, ye happy groves!’” (12-13) borrows from Blake’s ‘Night’, a proposition of absolute harmony in nature. Juxtaposed with the images of death (three crows (8), “a smell of dead limes” (10)), however, the lines take on a hellish quality. The “green fields” in particular are stripped of any idyllic connotations – in Walcott’s poem the colour evokes complicity with the colonialist impulse, and the accompanying images of rot and death. Green is associated in particular with the “dead” and “rotting” limes. Walcott’s vision is overlaid with Blake’s, producing an uneasy doubling: the exoticizing gaze of the colonialist, conceiving of the colonized land as a paradise, and the colonized’s reality of a despoiled and festering land. Blake’s vision is itself a breaking apart and reassembly of the Scripture from which it comes: the wolf and the lamb of Isaiah 11:6, and the image of the lion lying down with the calf in Isaiah 65:25. In Blake’s ‘Night’, the lion is protector of the lamb, an evocation of the Biblical vision of redemption and peace:
And now beside thee, bleating lamb, I can lie down and sleep… My bright mane for ever Shall shine like the gold As I guard o’er the fold.
This notion of colonial responsibility, of the colonizer as noble guardian and of the colonized as property to be guarded, is also associated with Kipling’s ‘The White Man’s Burden’, referenced in the third stanza of the poem. The parallel phrasing of the next lines – “abuse/ Of ignorance by Bible and by sword” (31-32) – links the two ‘civilizing’ means of colonialism, suggesting that the Bible, an ostensibly peaceful tool, is no less a weapon than the “sword”.
A different strategy is put into play, however, with Walcott’s use of Donne’s ‘Meditation XVII’ in the final stanza. Here Walcott rends himself in two: Donne’s “ashen prose” (44) leads him towards two opposing impulses – the first a blazing anger for the “slave… rotting in this manorial lake” (47), and the other the “coal of his compassion” (48) emerging from this rage. The roles of colonizer and colonized are acknowledged as reversible and ever-shifting, both grounds for condemnation and grounds for solidarity: “Albion too was once/A colony like ours” (49-50). “Nook-shotten, rook o’erblown” (51) reinforces the uncertainty and protean nature of their positions; here, a ‘nook’, typically a place of safety, signifies vulnerability and damage instead. Unconvincing and jarring, the switch into Donne’s words marks an ostensible deferral that rings hollow against the insistence of Walcott’s indignation and condemnation. The ellipsis that ends the quote and the poem further suggests an elision of Walcott’s own final words.
Walcott hence dismantles the master’s house with the master’s tools – but in doing so assimilates himself into colonialist ways of seeing. This idea is invoked throughout the poem even before it reaches its fullest expression in the final stanza. Walcott’s physical and spatial movement, corresponding with a breaking into first-person after an impersonal description of his surroundings, suggests both assimilation and resistance. The manor is surrounded by a wall covered with “grille ironwork/ Of exiled craftsmen protecting that great house/From guilt” (26-28); Walcott climbs this wall, breaking this protection, but also finds himself within the house, and figuratively initiated into the colonialist enterprise. He therefore positions himself as a liminal figure, able to condemn the moral failings of the colonial past as well as understand, from within, the language and cultural signifiers of the colonialist.
The tension between resistance and assimilation is mirrored in the poem’s (lack of) a rigid, consistent form and rhythm, which reinforces the contingency of language and articulation on the colonial influence. It is both a resistance – the refusal to use a traditional form – and some seeming occasional capitulation in the form of rhyming pairs. A careful examination of Walcott’s use of rhyme, however, reveals that it is predominantly used to associate the atrocities committed by the English and French colonists with tangible objects present in the ruins of the manor (limes/crimes/[evil] times). The rhyming pairs that occur in the final stanza (thought/fought and arranged/deranged) suggest a further dissonance between Walcott’s internal impulses and the external suppression of this impulse. On this reading, the rhyming pair of lines at the very end – ends/’friend’s’ – is neither straightforwardly a capitulation nor an indication of resolution: it is a final invocation of the complex snarl of borrowed words, imposed frames of reference, and moral judgments of the past.
Works Cited
Blake, William. ‘Night.’ The Oxford Book of English Verse. Ed. Arthur Thomas Quiller-
Couch. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1904. Web. 12 Feb. 2015. .
“disjecta membra.” Etymology Online. Web. 11 Feb. 2015. .
Donne, John. ‘Meditation XVII.’ Web. 12 Feb. 2015. .
“declension.” Oxford Dictionary of English. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. Print.
“galleon.” Oxford Dictionary of English. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. Print.
The King James Bible. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Print.
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