In March, the acclaimed poet Derek Walcott died at the age of 87. Born on the Caribbean island of Saint Lucia, Walcott became a literary voice known throughout the globe. Celebrated for his verse and his plays, he won the Nobel Prize in Literature, a MacArthur “genius” grant, an Obie award, and countless other prizes. He also taught at a number of institutions, including Boston University (where I now teach, though I didn’t know Walcott personally).
Reconciliation was one of Walcott’s great tasks as a poet. He fused the iconography of the Americas and of Europe in order to create a hybrid poetry. He combined allusions to classical myths with descriptions of the landscape of his native Saint Lucia, and he incorporated quotations from countless European authors in his works. This enterprise of poetic fusion reached a peak in perhaps his most famous work, Omeros, a reworking of Homer that loosely follows the terza rima verse form used by Dante Alighieri in The Divine Comedy. Omeros was published shortly before Walcott won the Nobel Prize in 1992, and, at least if last month’s obituaries are to be believed, will go down as a landmark piece in his poetic oeuvre.
While Omeros has gotten most of the headlines, a shorter and much earlier poem, 1956’s “Ruins of a Great House” reveals some of the abiding concerns of Walcott’s work in a more condensed way. In only about 50 lines, it shows how Walcott reworked tradition and reflected on the legacy of colonialism. The poem’s setting is the manor house at the heart of a former lime plantation. The speaker wanders the ruins of the house and conjures hints of the suffering wrought by life on this plantation.
The very genre of the poem suggests Walcott’s dialogue with English literature. Many works in the English canon include long descriptions of and meditations upon large estates in the English countryside. The 17th-century poet Andrew Marvell took a Yorkshire manor as his topic in “Upon Appleton House.” Countryside estates such as Pemberley feature in Jane Austen’s work, and Downton Abbey participates in the “great house” tradition.
Walcott, too, turned to the figure of the great house in this poem, but he focused on the moral costs of “this Great House.” Violence, coercion, and theft were the foundation-stones for this mansion. The stone cherubs at the gates of the ruins “shriek with stain,” both the marks of time and the metaphorical remnants of blood.
Limes appear throughout the poem. The “smell of dead limes quickens in the nose / The leprosy of empire.” The lime serves as an emblem both of the plantation and of the British Empire (the lime being one of the symbols of the British navy during the 19th century). Just as the great house of the plantation was deteriorating, so too was the British Empire during the 1950s. In the decades after World War II, the sun began to set on that empire, as it lost one colonial possession after another.
“Ruins of a Great House” is in part about the end of empire, about the transition from one era to the next. The great house once stood with bold majesty and bloody glamor. But now time has laid waste to the scene. The poem reflects on an elaborate wall that cannot protect the house “from the worm’s rent / Nor from the padded cavalry of the mouse.” Death comes even to empire and its institutions. Yet while “the men are gone,” the “rot remains with us.” Empire may be over, but its legacy persists.
The legacy of empire permeates the poem. “Ruins of a Great House” is full of quotations from British writers, including the 17th-century writer Thomas Browne and the Romantic poet William Blake. It mentions Rudyard Kipling, author of “The White Man’s Burden,” and “men like [John] Hawkins, Walter Raleigh, and [Francis] Drake,” who were key figures in early English forays into a transatlantic empire. The speaker of the poem has a complicated relationship with these “ancestral murderers and poets;” they provide so much of the material from which Walcott drew, but they also were part of a system that brought great suffering to this island (what the poem calls “