evil days”).
The final stanza of “Ruins of a Great House” adds to this complexity:
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…”
Reflecting on the cruelty of life at the estate, the speaker fills with rage at the thought of a slave’s body “rotting” in the lake.
The following lines, though, counter that rage with a sense of compassion, which is grounded in an awareness of common humanity. England, too, was once a colony — a possession of the Roman Empire. It too experienced waves of invasion and domination by foreign forces. Thus, the islands of the Caribbean and the isle of Britain share the legacy of being colonies. Historical parallels become a vehicle for revealing human connections.
The quotations Walcott included in this stanza come from a passage by the 17th-century British poet and clergyman John Donne:
No man is an island entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main; if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend’s or of thine own were; any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.
Donne’s famous lines (picked up by Ernest Hemingway and others) assert universal connections across mankind. The death of any person “diminishes” Donne because he has some connection — however distant — to all other human beings. So when the funeral bell tolls, it proclaims a death that touches us all.
Walcott incorporated these lines from Donne in order to underline the theme of common humanity. This incorporation also implies Walcott’s own desire to assimilate the conventions, images, and formal traits of European literature into his own hybrid verse. Realizing the common human condition of both the plantation owners and the slaves, of both Walcott and Donne, breaks down the walls built by blind anger. The final quotation from Donne performs a stunning reversal: the manor house that serves as an emblem of cruelty throughout much of the poem becomes, in the last line, a figure of interconnectedness.
“Ruins of a Great House” does not offer an excuse for past wrongs, but in showing compassion for sufferers as well as those who inflict suffering, the poem suggests the limits of vengeance that would populate a caste of ethical untouchables.
Combining ethical rigor and personal charity has implications for understanding the legacies of writers, too. Literary accomplishment does not ensure a life free from personal controversy; allegations of improprieties with female students ended Walcott’s bid to become Oxford Professor of Poetry. However, a writer’s work can triumph even when the writer falls short.
Throughout his career, Walcott reflected on how artists and writers in the Americas should respond to European influence. In “The Muse of History,” a famous essay from the 1970s, Walcott argued that the task of “New World” poets would be to take on the legacy of European culture (and European colonialism) and use it to weave new narratives of life and art. This weaving would join together the experiences of past victims and victimizers. He addressed the ancestors who bought and sold slaves and his ancestors who rode “in the filth-ridden gut of the slave ship,” saying to them, “I give the strange and bitter and yet ennobling thanks for the monumental groaning and soldering of two great worlds, like the halves of a fruit seamed by its own bitter juice, that exiled from your own Edens you have placed me in the wonder of another, and that was my inheritance and your gift.”
The “soldering of two great worlds” — Europe and the Americas — was one of Walcott’s major projects. Even as a v