342 PART THREE
This was no “lapdog in its satin seat” but an “abandoned, houseless thing,”
so Walcott “set it down in the village to survive / like all my ancestry. The
hound was here.” Here on home ground again, he imagines himself and Pis-
sarro watching “a windmill’s / vanes grind to a halt with slavery.” Not idyllic,
but it seals them both within a climate and calling.
Toward the end of Tiepolo’s Hound we come across the poet ’s self-portrait,
an up-front colorful presence after 150 pages of free-flowing, wide-reaching,
time-changing inward and outward experience. He ’s standing at an easel, look-
ing straight out at us—and likely intoa mirror, because his left hand ’s holding
a brush to the canvas, whereas the book’s back cover photo shows him right-
handed. In the poetry opposite this portrait his fine brush, as it were, gives
us couplets with “leaf-glued autumn pavements” from Pissarro’s France and
“a crescent fringe / of rustling yellow fronds on a white shore” in Walcott ’s
homeland. Yet another bifocal view of their environs.
An astonishing sight begins the poem’s closing section.
The swallows flit in immortality,
moving yet motionless on the canvas roofs.
Whether in Paris or St. Thomas, in fact or in art, Walcott has all along been
tracking this singular thought. Young West Indians were impressed by Euro-
pean art, “the fountaining elation / of feathery palms in an engraving’s stasis.”
Veronese ’s “bright rotunda riots / with fury that is motionless but moves”—“O
turbulence, astounding in its stasis.” And now come the swallows, “moving yet
motionless.”
Call this moment spellbinding, this paradoxical sight and image. The swal-
lows exist in and out of time. Surging with life they’re stayed by art, like the
lovers on Keats’s Grecian urn, and that Autumn ode keeps its swallows gathering
in the skies. Neruda grasps Machu Picchu’s potency:
Gale sustained on a slope.
Immobile turquoise cataract.On the page as on canvas, Walcott catches West Indian life “moving yet motion-
less,” like the surf ’s “exploding spray.”
Poetry like painting holds still the “gusting harbour” of St. Thomas and
“egrets rising.” The still motion in these ordinary miracles, to borrow his term,
also warps time as he brings Pissarro into his own day and “we stand doubled
in each other’s eyes.” Through memory, Tiepolo’s Hound conjugates past with
present, and history with art. At the outset Pissarro’s family strolled past a
synagogue. The last section will “bring the occasional pilgrim to St. Thomas / to
find the synagogue on its small street.” Derek Walcott ’s pilgrimage, “a search
that will lead us / where we began,” has caught two artists wandering from the