Can Poetry Save the Earth?: A Field Guide to Nature Poems

DEREK WALCOTT, FIRST TO SEE THEM 339

slavery, tides with couplets and lament, and letting Van Gogh-like gulls offset
Catholic dogma. The painter’s eye, the writer’s ear can do all this, bonding
human acts to nature ’s.
Strolling with his family here is a now-famous artist, born one hundred
years before Walcott. Camille Pissarro’s ancestors, Sephardic Jews, had fled the
Spanish Inquisition to France, then settled in St. Thomas where Pissarro was
born. Now the later, West Indian poet bonds with the earlier painter, who left
the islands for Paris, taught Cézanne for a while, joined the great Impressionists,
and died abroad. Walcott questions his own affinities via the arc of Pissarro’s
life. “You could have been our pioneer,” he tells him, in your “archipelago,
where / hues are primal, red trees, green shade, blue water.” Has Walcott, living
partly in the United States, also betrayed Caribbean roots? The verse itself of
Tiepolo’s Hound gives body to this dual quest: paired couplets casually rhymed,
“civilising” with “egrets rising,” “torn almond leaf ” with “remembered life,”
“thigh” with “Levi.”
And Tiepolo’s hound? Early on, Walcott finds himself in New York’s Metro-
politan Museum, stunned by a painting’s Renaissance feast.

Then I caught a slash of pink on the inner thigh

of a white hound entering the cave of a table,

so exact in its lucency at The Feast of Levi,

I felt my heart halt.

This one detail gives him “sacred shock,” and “even as I write,”

paused on a step of this couplet, I have never found

its image again, a hound in astounding light.

His pulsing lines jump-start a quest, tying “as I write” to “astounding light,”
“one stroke for a dog’s thigh!” Painting and poetry alike offer an “art of seeing,”
while “The Feast of Levi” signals Pissarro’s Jewish otherness behind Walcott ’s
alienated search for what art can do.
Ultimately we don’t know whether the painting is by Tiepolo or maybe
Veronese, and Walcott never does find that white hound. What counts is light,
ecstasy, “the stroke, the syllable, planted in the furrows / of page and canvas,”
and the venture of two kindred artists—a half-African at home in English, a
French-speaking Jew in and out of exile. Following Pissarro away from home
toward Gauguin and Van Gogh, Giotto and Botticelli, Walcott as painter aches
for what ’s left behind: “tossing green bananas / and the prongs of the ginger
lily,” “bright wind on water,” “tints beneath black skin,”

the wet light moving down the ebony fissure

of a fisherman’s shoulders as he hauled in a seine,