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

DEREK WALCOTT, FIRST TO SEE THEM 341

the fraying banner of the dishevelled stream

reddens the reeds from some invisible slaughter.

A rhyme grinds history against nature with an artist ’s touch, “slaughter” against
“brightened water,” reddened reeds.
Opposing empire he creates homeward scenes,
the still pond and the egrets beating home
through the swamp trees, the mangrove ’s anchors.

Mangroves send their exposed roots down into the ground. So should the is-
lands’ artists. Their early poets echoed Wordsworth and painters copied Con-
stable, yet the Caribbean gum tree, “The gommier in flower did not mimic the
dogwood,” a northern growth—“they were, like the breadfruit, true to their
sense of place.”
About certain namings, little can be done. Walcott the “West Indian” bridles
at “American” christening of the “New World.” What Columbus, “What the
Genoan did,”

fingering our rocks on his rosary, was to seal,

rubbing finger and thumb, the indelible christening

of St. Thomas, Santa Lucia, Trinidad, the unreal

baptism of roofs beaded with rain and glistening.

Perhaps what ’s misdone by language, language can undo or redo. Walcott ’s eye
for light and ear for rhyme recoup a pre-Christian reality of glistening roofs,
like the red wheelbarrow William Carlos Williams “glazed with rain /water.”
What ’s more, behind his mercantile, imperial, religious, and personal aims,
Columbus did feel ecstasy at the prolific world he found. His voice begins Wil-
liams’s In the American Grain: “Bright green trees, the whole land so green it is
a pleasure to look on it.”
Still tracking Pissarro’s retreat to the Old World, Walcott wonders about the
1892 Dreyfus affair, where a French-Jewish army captain was falsely accused of
treason. Did this scandal taint the painter? “Examined closely, his foliage could
be read / as Hebrew script.” Like a spy, “Had he not copied with Sephardic
eyes / those fields... ?” Ironically, Dreyfus was banished to Ile du Diable,
France ’s Caribbean penal colony.
Finally Walcott journeys back home.
Then one noon where acacias shade the beach
I saw the parody of Tiepolo’s hound
in the short salt grass, requiring no research,
but something still unpainted, on its own ground.