Walcott, Poet and Painter

I am lucky enough to have on my wall a painting by Derek Walcott, a watercolour about thirteen by fifteen inches in landscape format, dated 1988. People read the painting in interestingly different ways. Some immediately recognise the subject matter, but others at first see indeterminate shapes and colours that resolve into an identifiable subject only after an interval of time. In what follows I use these reactions to a painting as a way into what I take to be a defining characteristic of Walcott’s poetry. The painting offers the pleasure of balancing between the two reactions described, never settling down as one or the other. There are several levels at which this goes on. The subject is, in fact, nothing much: some bits of wood, possibly tree roots, tangled in weed, jetsam on a beach, but it affords the pleasure of recognition, the mimesis of reality traditional to Western art since the Renaissance. This carries with it the additional pleasure for cognoscenti at the painter’s skill in managing the conventions of representation that enable us to accomplish the act of recognition, a pleasure, that is, in the virtuosity of performance. (In the case of this painting, the conventions are those developed by the English watercolourists and seascape artists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and the optical and chromatic studies of the French Impressionists.) There is as well an abstract pleasure, akin to the pleasure of music, in which we forget the subject matter as we respond to the arrangement of planes, masses, and tones, their intervals, gradations, correspondences, and rhythms as elements in themselves. And beyond even that, just as we can lose the subject matter in its composition so we can lose the composition in the composing, in purely local effects, the run of a colour, the colour of a colour, the sweep or scribble of a brush, the myriad incidents and accidents as they occur on the paper, the marking and staining and even absence of colouring of the paper itself. This is perhaps the most rapt and wondering reception of the painting, for here we seem to share the painter’s intimacy with the coming into being of the picture, to witness its process of emerging from and through the contingency of its medium in the miraculous anadyomene of art. And that returns us to the resulting image.

It is no accident that it is an image of something thrown up by the sea. As Edward Baugh, Walcott’s best critic, observes in his book on Another Life, when the poet says “my sign was water” he alludes to being born under Aquarius. Walcott is preeminently the poet of the sea not only because he is an islander, but also because his art is like the sea. The sea carries things between continents and casts them arbitrarily into new worlds. Its tides wash beaches and make them new as if continually starting again. It suggests power even when calm, a Caribbean cool. It smoothes, shapes, and transforms anything that comes into it, even rubbish. It is the sea as medium, then, a medium like art in its capacity to transform, that supplies Walcott with an endless metaphor. Its only rival in this capacity is another medium, light. And it is Walcott’s emphasis on his media that imparts the elusiveness to his poetry and affords its peculiar pleasure of balancing between the concrete image and the medium through which we perceive it.