Furrowing the Soil with His Pen

Abstract

Given Nobel Laureate Derek Walcott’s intense concern with the physical and geographical aspects of his native Caribbean and other North American locations, it is perhaps surprising this concern is not mirrored in his poetical depictions of England. In fact, Walcott refers to the English rural landscape quite sparingly; any engagement with English pastoral tradition is instead via his prose writings or poetry that pay overt and deliberate homage to English poets themselves, or through his writing style, where he reflects the meter, rhythm, or language of English pastoral poetry. While this lack of concern and rejection of the English countryside (symbolically often seen as the epitome of Englishness) as subject matter might not otherwise be so unusual in writers from former colonies such as St. Lucia—Walcott’s birthplace and home—it is of note because in so many other respects his writing and poetry act in great homage to a classical and an English tradition. Especially through the formal characteristics of poetry, Walcott highly prizes the pastoral nature of the English poetical tradition, and thus his lack of attention toward descriptions of the English countryside becomes more marked. Moreover, where he does overtly engage with it and acknowledge its influence, Walcott usually sees the English rural landscape as hostile or unwelcoming. This chapter aims to explore the nature and significance of Walcott’s resistance to overt engagement with the English countryside, where more usually, as Walcott himself understands in his own writing, “topography delineates its verse.”³

Press one foot on the soil of England and the phantoms spring. Poets, naturalists, novelists have harrowed and hallowed it for centuries with their furrowing pens as steadily as its yeomen once did with the plough.

—Derek Walcott, “The Garden Path: V. S. Naipaul”¹

One icon of British heritage has a profoundly British cast. That is the landscape. Nowhere else is landscape so freighted as legacy. Nowhere else does the very term suggest not just scenery and genre de vie, but quintessential national virtues.

—David Lowenthal, “The Island Garden: English Landscape and British Identity”²