SOURCE: Bensen, Robert. “The Painter as Poet: Derek Walcott's Midsummer.” Literary Review: An International Journal of Contemporary Writing 29, no. 3 (spring 1986): 259-68.

An island of obsessive beauty, a people impoverished but rich in their cultural heritage from Africa and Europe, and a lifetime to celebrate them in art: these gifts had been given the young Derek Walcott, who swore with his friend Dunstan St. Omer not to leave St. Lucia before they had put the island on canvas and in words—every ravine, inlet, mangrove swamp and hill track.¹

Walcott had been drawn to art early by being “more deeply moved by the sight of works of art than by that of the things which they portray,” as Malraux wrote of Giotto. Walcott used Malraux's anecdote as an epigraph in Another Life, in which he wrote of his discovering art as if he were Saul, blinded with revelation of the true religion (AL, p. 1). His will alone could “transfigure” the mountain shacks of the poor into a “cinquecento fragment in gilt frame” (AL, p. 4). He felt the power of art to recreate the world, to transcend the poverty of those shacks, to redeem his dispossessed people and their history. The task was as immense as that of Adam standing before his unnamed world, though Walcott had this advantage: in the books of his father's library, he had inherited the work of centuries of European masters.

The West Indian reverence for ancestors became for Walcott a need to assimilate tradition, to assume its features, to make it part of his visual vocabulary. He believed that his knowledge of tradition would augment his treatment of the island's watercolor seas, its vegetation ripe for oils. But where St. Omer painted “with the linear elation of an eel,” Walcott's own hand was “crabbed by that style, / this epoch, that school / or the next” (AL, p. 59). Tradition proved too powerful a master; he was its sunstruck Caliban.

His gift emerged instead in the multiple facets of metaphor, in language as physical as what it described. Horace's critical observation, ut pictura poesis, Walcott made into a conduit for painting to nourish his poetry, in the character of his imagemaking, his visual imagination, as well as in his sense of line and composition. Painting pervades his use of metaphor, as in this imagistic Moebius strip in which art and life imitate each other endlessly: “The hills stippled with violet, as if they had seen Pissarro,” or in this rendering of a seascape as still life: “A peel of yellow sand / curled like a lemon rind across the sea's blue dish” (AL p. 74; pp. 66-7).

The connection between poet and painter in Walcott lies deeper than eye-level, being rooted in his early, most basic experience of the world. Another Life is the autobiography of his life as a young artist, an intimate odyssey in which he first experiences the primal facts of life and death through art. He undertakes the conventional epic journey to the underworld, the land of the dead, which he finds in books of paintings by the European masters:

I learnt their strict necrology of dead kings,
bones freckling the rushes of damp tombs,
the light-furred luminous world of Claude,
their ruined temples, and in drizzling twilights, Turner.

—AL, p. 44

Among the relics of art, he recognizes his father, who is not his natural father (also a painter, but who had died young) and not the liturgical Our-Father-who-art-in-heaven, but “Our father, / who floated in the vaults of Michelangelo” (AL, p. 44). His spiritual father could be accessible only through art, wherein Walcott collects his true heritage and recognizes his future.

It was then
                    that he fell in love, having no care
for truth,
                    that he could enter the doorway of a triptych,
that he believed
                    those three stiff horsemen cantered past a rock,
                    towards jewelled cities on a cracked horizon,
                    that the lances of Uccello shivered him,
                    like Saul, unhorsed,
that he fell in love with art,
                    and life began.

—AL, p. 44

If European art was a reliquary, it was also a revelation. He fell in love with its power over him and with the power it places in the hands of the very few.

Ars longa, vita brevis. Those chosen by the Muse must devote their lives to the practice of her art; there is no other way. In Walcott's Caribbean, the artist, the story-teller, the poet, the raconteur, houngan, or priest; all exercise power over domains beyond the ken of the uninitiated—the past, the future, the dead, the fortunes and misfortunes of the living. The monumental certainty of vocation in Walcott's poetry comes out of a selfhood that is forged in a culture rather more distant from that of the United States than has been generally recognized in this country. Certainly the magnitude of his appropriation of European traditions in art and literature for his life-long effort to make poetry and painting “cohere” and ultimately “ignite” suggests the primal role of the artist as a tribal, and Promethean, fire-starter, on whom the survival of his people depends (AL, pp. 58-9).

Painting has always been at the heart of Walcott's poetry, as central as St. Omer's altarpiece is to the Roseau Valley in “St. Lucie,” in which the painting reflects the life of the valley that surrounds it.² The preoccupation with painting in the autobiographic mode of Another Life moves toward self-portraiture in Midsummer.³ In the former volume, painting is the occasion for the high drama of self-discovery, as the author recounts his enthusiasm and disappointment as a young painter. After thirty years of devotion to both arts, the episodic narrative of the young painter continues in Midsummer in poems frequently conceived and composed as verbal paintings—portraits, landscapes, seascapes, studies and sketches. Painting informs many of the poems directly as subject (“Gauguin” XIX and “Watteau” XX), as a source of imagery, in the handling of qualities of light and color, and in the range of themes. Painting prompts his intense scrutiny of his motives for art, of large historical questions about the relationship between art and power, and of the value of art in the confrontation of human mortality.

I

Midsummer is the poet's sketchbook, the artist's diary, running the course of one year from summer to summer. It is less a recording or a chronology than it is a clearing of vision, an arrangement of things in their true significance, which is what both painter and poet mean by composition:

Through the stunned afternoon, when it's too hot to think
and the muse of this inland ocean still waits for a name,
and from the salt, dark room, the tight horizon line
catches nothing, I wait. Chairs sweat. Paper crumples the floor.
A lizard gasps on the wall. The sea glares like zinc.
Then, in the door light: not Nike loosening her sandal,
but a girl slapping sand from her foot, one hand on the frame.

—XXV

Light, its movements and textures and intensities and absence, is all. It glazes the brilliant seascape and shades the room, both of which the poet has carefully prepared as ground for the figure of one of his daughters, or the nameless muse herself, coming in from the beach. She is also the artist's model, her silhouette balanced momentarily in one long line that is backlit by the previous line. Her image is both painterly and sculptural, classical and modern. She is not Nike, but she assumes her pose à la Degas, which Walcott alters both toward the Baroque by her hand's bracing against the frame, and toward a sly Post-Modernist pun, as the frame itself is framed within the poetic image. The loving portrait is in part the work of a bored father with nothing to do but wait for his daughter and her everyday grace. It is also the work of a poet with a painter's eye for nuances of light and composition, for the suggestion of the figure's weight, balance and form in the girl's gesture. Her very being, in its simplicity, answers the poet's masked self-portrait which begins the poem (“The sun has fired my face to terra-cotta”) and the Faustian promise of the surf that he

                    shall see transparent Helen pass like a candle
flame in sunlight, weightless as woodsmoke that hazes
the sand with no shadow.

The girl is neither mask nor spirit. She is just what the poet had been fishing for with the horizon line, a well-made pun on his own poetic line. Until she enters, his lines have caught nothing of moment, merely the momentary, the static objects at hand which, lacking her presence, fail to cohere into composition. The setting needs her, the poetic line needs her, the artist needs her—indeed, her coming allows time, which had nearly ceased in the poet's torpor, to resume. She is no more than a sketch, but those quick, bold strokes of the pen bear the emotional weight of the poem.

Where the young painter in Another Life wanted to surround his island's shacks with a gilt frame, the seasoned master in Midsummer concludes that “the frame of human happiness is time,” knowing that the frame of time is art. At the beginning of Another Life, line after line calls back the moment when light failed and his drawing was done, and his future as a painter seemed assured. The poet stitches his lines into a verbal net that pulls the moment back and holds it, briefly: “I begin here again, / begin until this ocean's / a shut book. … / Begin with twilight …” (AL, p. 3).

In Midsummer, time has entered the very lines, extending their duration, becoming part of the artist's gesture. The apparent ease with which the girl in the doorway is fixed in portraiture lies in the grace of the poetic line swelling beyond the surface tension of iambic pentameter, the measure most conformable to English phrasing and rhythm. Walcott uses that meter elsewhere in poetry and verse plays with Elizabethan richness and Jacobean wit. But in Midsummer he takes deep draughts of the warm Caribbean air and his line lengthens with the amplitude of his West Indian English. It lengthens as the fecund Caribbean crowds into his field of vision. The poems press toward the white margin like a sea of words at high tide. And because time moves slowly in the tropics, the line takes longer to ripen, all motion slows but that of the mind and the mind's eye:

Something primal in our spine makes the child swing
from the gnarled trapeze of a sea-almond branch.
I have been comparing the sea-almond's shapes to the suffering
in Van Gogh's orchards. And that, too, is primal. A bunch
of sea grapes hangs over the calm sea.

—XXVIII

Here is the poet at ease, on holiday with his daughters, getting a few lines down in his sketchbook, perhaps for Midsummer's cover painting of the sea-almond tree, as well as for the poem. The long lines might read as prose, did not the end-rhymes staple the aural canvas taut for the internal Pointillism of vowels and consonants, which register on the ear as a patterned aura around the shape of the child. The long vowels in primal, spine, and child establish a declarative line that anchors the precarious swing as firmly as the baroque branch anchors the child in the second line, with its clustered consonants twisting around the darker e's and a's. The initial long i's, the firm open tones of the poet's meditative mind-set, prepare the ear for the stroke of the ideogrammatic I, the body's slender stalk from which the poem's speculative intelligence will branch.

Comparing the sea-almond's shape to that of Van Gogh's olive trees is neither pretentious nor an idle exercise of Postcolonial wit. Rather, he is asserting the validity of his experience and culture in that island which is “known … for making nothing” (I). In his youth, he had imagined the landscape transformed into fourteenth century pastoral in a gilt frame, but now the frame is gone, the European manner is gone, and the tree itself as an image of suffering is at issue. And the issue is resolved instantly and certainly.

The poet resumes his composition of the landscape by noticing the bunch of sea grapes. He outlines the arrangement of things on the beach and out on the reef, a still ground against which the most minute movements register on the surveying eye, as in a painting so lifelike the viewer thinks something moved:

                                                            … Noon
jerks toward its rigid, inert center.
Sunbathers broil on their grid. …
In the thatched beach bar, a clock tests its stiff elbow
every minute and, outside, an even older iguana
climbs hand over claw, as unloved as Quasimodo,
into his belfry of shade, swaying there.

The day's heat brings the human figures, the lizard and clock all near the melting point of Daliesque surrealism, but Walcott has them all hold their poses timelessly on a day as infinitely repeatable as any other in the tropics.

But the poet is not to be self-hypnotized by his own idyll.

                                                            … When a
cloud darkens, my terror caused it. Lizzie and Anna
lie idling on different rafts, their shadows under them.
The curled swell has the clarity of lime.
In two more days my daughters will go home.
The frame of human happiness is time,
the child's swing slackens to a metronome.
Happiness sparkles on the sea like soda.

Isolate the last line, and it's pure corn, tacked onto a perfectly good final quatrain, and a violation of Pound's dictum not to turn abstractions into symbols such as “dim lands of peace.” But it is also the perfect grace note to the sombre intimation of mortality in the beat of the child's swing, a serendipitous dance on the graver, epigrammatic, “The frame of human happiness is time.” The line effervesces just as the poet almost submits to Time and Fate; it freshens like a late afternoon breeze; it gently declines to fret; it insists that for the moment at least, the poet of exile and rootlessness look no further.

II

But the sparkle dissipates, the sun declines a few degrees, the moment with its tranquility passes, and the sequence resumes on the next page. Walcott's calm is the eye of the hurricane, the moment before “that thundercloud breaks from its hawser” (XXVI), or the morning after “a storm has wrecked the island” (XLIX). The West Indian poet must either master or submit to the extremes of his region's nature as well as its history. Walcott's powers are always sustained by the immediate, the local, firmly grounded as a lightning rod driven into the earth to pull divine flame from the sky:

                    Christ, my craft, and the long time it is taking!
Sometimes a flash is seen, a sudden exultation
of lightning fixing earth in its place; the asphalt's skin
smells freshly of childhood in the drying rain.

—XIII

Art is long, life short: the labor continues, work accumulates, the lines increase stroke by stroke their store of reality. His work bears nothing of the self-cancelling exercises in syntax that are the other side of modernism. Midsummer is studded with brief self-portraits of the poet as laborer, working his physical and metaphoric lines:

                    My palms have been sliced by the twine
of the craft I have pulled at for more than forty years. …
The lines I love have all their knots left in.

—XXV

The West Indian sailor-fisherman must keep his nets mended or he catches nothing. The knots give a sure grip on the experience that is the object of the poet's handiwork. Walcott's line can thin out to a watercolor wash, or thicken into impasto, to such density that the nouns stuck in the verbiage pull the syntax to a halt: “Mud. Clods. The sucking heel of the rain-flinger” (XXXV). Halfway between Homer and Heaney, the thick, clotted monosyllables ballast the agile feminine ending: from dull earth springs the mythic god. His lines have a muscular energy that confirms the self-portraits of the poet as Herculean laborer, doomed to pull the full weight of his memory in his wake:

I drag, as on a chain behind me, laterite landscapes—
                                                            … I pull the voices
of children behind me.

Or, as a tailor, an important occupation in the Caribbean, remembering his mother treadling at her Singer:

I stitch her lines to mine now with the same machine.

—XVII

Or, as the painter at once glorifying his subject and laboring to provide through art an antidote to the destruction of history:

A radiant summer so fierce it turns yellow
like the haze before a holocaust. Like a general,
I arrange lines that must increase its radiance, work
that will ripen with peace, like a gold-framed meadow
in Breughel or Pissarro.

—VIII

Yeat's conception of things falling apart from a failing center pervades Midsummer—the island wrecked by storm, clouds as “pages in a damp culture that come apart,” the poet's exile from his family—though in the West Indies that may all be business as usual. The fisherman and tailor keep mending, and the poet, like the painter, composes his lines to harness the sun and harvest the parched, intractable fields.

III

I can sense it coming from far, too, Maman, the tide
since day has passed its turn, but I still note
that as a white gull flashes over the sea, its underside
catches the green, and I promise to use it later.

—XV

Sensing the approach of death, the poet persists in recording the minute truths of his experience, storing his sensory impressions to use later in a painting. There is no diminishing of ambition, just the recognition that of the thousands, perhaps millions of seagulls he has surely seen, he is just now noticing how its belly reflects the ocean. In Another Life, the young artist was awakened through painting to the power of death. His tropical paradise admits death, breeds it as rapidly as life, awaits its stroke as the poet and his mother anticipate the inevitable tide. Death gives meaning to his life's work, though such a tidy consolation seems remote in Midsummer. Momentarily one can cherish the memory of “clean, scoured things that … / the sea has whitened, chaste”:

A yard, an old brown man with a mustache
like a general's, a boy drawing castor-oil leaves in
great detail, hoping to be another Albrecht Durer.
I have cherished these better than coherence
as the same tide for us both, Maman, comes nearer. …

But the emotional tide of the poetic sequence will not settle into nostalgia, as, in the following poem, the poet looks beyond the individual death toward the massive symmetries of metropolis and necropolis, and asks, “So what shall we do for the dead … ?” (XVI). The imagination that returns the things of this life is futile in supposing that the dead “share the immense, inaudible pulse of the clock-shaped earth.” Our treasured memorabilia they cannot see, and natural beauty means nothing to those suspended outside of time, neither grim nor beatific, who on the shore “wait neither to end nor begin.” The echo of Milton's “They also serve who only stand and wait” (Sonnet XIX) focusses the problem in both poems: the value of human effort in the face of death. Walcott asks, “What use is any labor we / accept?” He does not, like Hercules, gain life thereby, or like Milton, an afterlife in paradise. It is the question the artist asks of his vocation, and while it is not answered as a theologian or philosopher might, neither is it dismissed. It broods above the progress of Midsummer from the moment the clouds part in the first poem. If we are incapable of imagining our end, what use is the imagination? What use is the life devoted to it, and why spend years in its cultivation? Why labor only to grow, as the poet laments, “more skillful and more dissatisfied?” (IX).

The issue of the efficacy of art is enlarged by the sense of the artist's diminishing power to affect the outcome of humanity's large struggles. Walcott's helplessness in the face of tyranny, poverty, and high-tech weaponry is fixed in an emblematic triptych:

                                                            The stalled cars are as frozen
as the faces of cloaked queues on a Warsaw street,
or the faces of black derelicts flexing over a fire-
barrel under the El; above, the punctured sky
is needled by rockets that keep both Empires high.

—XLII

The imperial power-junkies rule both skies with absolute despair. It may be too late, certainly too late to establish even a lopsided equation between the potential for absolute destruction and the value of art. The poem ends with a vision of a city bombed back almost to the Stone Age. For the origin of such despair, Walcott turns back to the beginnings of modern warfare and modern art in the late nineteenth century.

Impressionism, the beginning of modernity in art, accomplished by isolating the momentary effects of light, made possible the fragmentation of space and obliteration of form that was to come, and the meaning of art increasingly lay in its surface, its superficiality:

Art was une tranche de vie, cheese or home-baked bread—
light, in their view, was the best that time offered.
They eye was the only truth, and whatever traverses
the retina fades when it darkens; the depth of nature morte
was that death itself is only another surface
like the canvas, since painting cannot capture thought.

—XVIII

The Impressionist surface is lovely, capable of joie de vivre and nostalgia, but death arrived on a much grander scale than the painters of “bustled skirts, boating parties, zinc-white strokes on water” could handle, and they retreated into abstraction.

Then, like dried-up tubes, the coiled soldiers
piled up on the Somme, and Verdun. And the dead
less real than a spray burst of chrysanthemums,
the identical carmine for still life and for the slaughter
of youth. They were right—everything becomes
its idea to the painter with easel rifled on his shoulders.

The image of the painter is borrowed from the more confident days of Another Life, when painting was a disciplined act of love:

Gregorias, the easel rifled on his shoulder, marching
towards an Atlantic flashing tinfoil,
singing ‘O Paradiso’
till the Western breakers laboured to that music,
his canvas crucified against a tree.

—AL, p. 52

Gregorias is marching off to his Passion, his holy war. In Midsummer, the painter retains the posture, but the soldiering is ambivalent, a mimicking of the real soldier going off to nearly certain death, and the pure motive of art for art's sake is sullied by the carnage it can represent, but not prevent, with generous amounts of carmine.

The bitterly sardonic tone of “They were right,” about coolly abstracting from harsh reality its Platonic idea, updates Auden's famous line, “About suffering they were never wrong, / The Old Masters.”⁴ The farmer plows and the galleon sails while Icarus drowns unnoticed by all except by the artist, who sees all and understands all and tells all. But Walcott's artist is also right: art is abstraction. To create art=to paint pictures=to write poems. Between infinitive and object, between the making and the made, the triggering subject cannot intrude, merely follow appended by a preposition: to paint a picture of, to write poems about. The artist is removed from his subject by the very act of creating. The challenge is to connect himself to his subject through the art, even if the subject is oneself: “I cannot connect these lines with the lines on my face” (VI). How much more difficult then it must be to connect with matters of conscience. His bitter acknowledgement of the rectitude of those for whom death “is only another surface / like the canvas” underscores his deepest doubts about his vocation, which he had begun with the greatest exuberance: “I felt that/the gift of poetry had made me one of the chosen, / that all experience was kindling to the Muse” (XLI). To be one on whom nothing is lost is almost to lose oneself to that Apollonian as well as Hebraic flame. The burning of the chosen one is of course double-edged in a poem about Hitler's death camps. The ultimate question in that poem parallels Walcott's earlier question in XVI about the value of labor in the face of death.

                                        But had I known then
that the fronds of my island were harrows, its sand the ash
of the distant camps, would I have broken my pen
because this century's pastorals were being written
by the chimneys of Dachau, of Auschwitz, of Sachsehausen?

The rhyme of the last, prolific camp with pen and written tightens the sense of complicity of the artist, now self-accused. The syllables mount like the dreaded piles of human kindling.

IV

Where Auden's subject in “Musee des Beaux Arts” was the single tragedy that fails to touch the common lives of men, Walcott reverses the proportion: how mass suffering fails to touch the artist absorbed in his work. We expect the artist to be a seismograph of his culture and register its shock. According to Pasternak, “The more self-contained the individuality from which the life derives, the more collective … is its story. In a genius the domain of the subconscious … is composed of all that is happening to his readers.”⁵ If what is happening in the world is unprecedented destruction, and if the scale of threatened destruction multiplies astronomically over half a century, the artist's imagination can no longer draw vitally from the collective life and his choice of subject becomes amoral: whether to paint the casualty or the chrysanthemum makes no difference to the dead.

Randall Jarrell diagnosed the malady afflicting modern poets who “no longer have the heart to write about what is most terrible in the world of the present: the bombs waiting beside the rockets, the hundreds of millions staring into the temporary shelter of their television sets.”⁶ Today the bombs are clustered atop the rockets and the Doomsday scenario is a prime-time television movie starring the people of Lawrence, Kansas. More and more, there is no place to hide.

The paralysis of the artist is perhaps an accurate reflection of a world trapped by its own defense systems. The artist, if we take Midsummer at face value, needs to confront the terror, to risk incinerating the will and drowning out the muse's call. In the poem about the death camps, though forty years after the fact, their impact raises the question of whether the poet would have continued to write had he known of their horror.

The question is not rhetorical, even if it comes late, because it is really a question of faith and sustenance. That the poem has been written is the answer to its own question. Art turns out to be not for its own sake but for the sake of the artist, turns out to be his way of sustaining faith that there is more to life than dying, the faith that allows him to move into the unknown territory of his work.

Those, like Rimbaud, who lose that faith, quit and go on living in spiritual if not physical exile, or quit living altogether. In the last poem of Midsummer Walcott writes of the boyhood “faith I betrayed, or the faith that betrayed me” (LIV), the “distracting signs” of which rise before him out of the landscape. He wonders where is “the heaven I worship with no faith in heaven,” and in that paradox is the strength to persevere, to create what he began by celebrating. The portrait of the poet and painter as the ambivalent, troubled, yet titanic creator is completed in the final lines of the book. As he had in the first poems of the book, he addresses the Russian poet Joseph Brodsky, who epitomizes the artist exiled from the land that sustains his art:

Ah, Joseph, though no man ever dies in his own country,
the grateful grass will grow thick from his heart.

The poet's metaphorical recreation of his world is not complete until his body physically joins its nature to that larger nature, which in life it could never completely align with.

Art is the way to explore that misalignment, to draw the figure it makes upon the human spirit. That is where painting and poetry meet in Walcott's work. A line is made by a point of no dimension moving in one unchanging direction. That ideal line can scarcely exist in painting, and not merely because the point of a brush is at least as thick as one sable hair. The painter works in areas of paint, and the line is defined by their misalignment, becoming a record of their disjuncture. Walcott's poetic line is similarly shaped as a record of the disjointedness of his experience in the world. The true artist is the maker—poet or painter—whose line is the seam joining the world together, composing it as fast as our collective despair keeps letting it fall from our grasp.

Notes

1. Derek Walcott, Another Life (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1973), p. 52. Cited as AL. Walcott has frequently written of the West Indian writer's need to resist the tendency to sentimentalize poverty and lapse into the romantic cliche that the beauty of the Caribbean can inspire. Nevertheless his elemental response to that beauty is awe: “The beauty is overwhelming, it really is. It's not a used beauty, there are no houses; it's not a known beauty, and so the privilege of just looking at these places and seeing their totally uncorrupted existence remains an Adamic experience” [“An Interview with Derek Walcott,” conducted by Edward Hirsch, Contemporary Literature XX:3 (1979), 283].

2. Sea Grapes (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1976), p. 46. “The chapel, as the pivot of this valley, / round which whatever is rooted loosely turns … / draws all to it, to the altar / and the massive altarpiece. …”

3. Midsummer (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1984). Poems from Midsummer are cited in the text by their Roman numeral.

4. Collected Poems (New York: Random House, 1976), p. 146.

5. Boris Pasternak, Safe Conduct, trans. Beatrice Scott (New York: New Directions, 1958), pp. 26-7.

6. “Fifty Years of American Poetry,” The Third Book of Criticism (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1969), pp. 332-3.