 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 vision of cultural fusion informs the style of his poetry, the soldering of worlds has ethical implications, too. Accounting for the complexities of others’ experiences can remind us of our abiding human bonds, even amidst the blood and muck of the world. “Ruins of a Great House” ends with a vision of compassion — which surely is a gift.
Image Credit: Pixabay.
Victor Hugo, when asked about the other parts of Dante’s Divine Comedy that aren’t the widely-read Inferno, had this to say: “The human eye was not made to look upon so much light, and when the poem becomes happy, it becomes boring.” Ouch. Is this why so many of us haven’t even read Dante, despite his being a kind of cultural icon?