"In God We Troust": Derek Walcott and God

"Do you believe in God?" I remember the interviewer in the company of another poet and me, asking Derek Walcott in the summer of 1986 at a BBC 2 Arena Caribbean Nights recording on the culture and arts of the Caribbean.¹ Derek Walcott paused for a moment and replied, "Only if God gets me another poem." Laughter erupted and with it a nod of recognition toward the contract with productivity every poet is sworn to at almost Mephistolian cost; laughter and a comic end to a serious subject. The idea of a poet selling a loved one for the price of a poem is not new. What is new or sounds like a new spin on an old thread is Derek Walcott's idea that the poem itself, namely poetics and poetry as a process, may contain God, indemnify spirituality, and en-shrine faith in the middle of an absence of any obvious belief system, by investing in a formal procedure called the composed poem. If this is the case then the evidence should reside in the body of work. Nuggets of wisdom to do with a religious subject should be extractable from the work where the work functions as a surrogate cathedral for a missing conventional God worshipped in a conventional way.

As early as 1948 in "A City's Death by Fire" a poem preserved in his Collected Poems, Derek Walcott expresses a reverence for the trappings of the church that borders on religious conversion.

A City's Death by Fire

After that hot gospeller had leveled all but the churched sky,
I wrote the tale by tallow of a city's death by fire;
Under a candle's eye, that smoked in tears, I
Wanted to tell, in more than wax, of faiths that were snapped like wire.
All day I walked abroad among the rubbled tales,
Shocked at each wall that stood on the street like a liar;
Loud was the bird-rocked sky, and all the clouds were bales
Torn open by looting, and white, in spite of the fire.
By the smoking sea, where Christ walked, I asked, why
Should a man wax tears, when his wooden world fails?
In town, leaves were paper, but the hills were a flock of faiths;
To a boy who walked all day, each leaf was a green breath
Rebuilding a love I thought was dead as nails,
Blessing the death and the baptism by fire.

(Collected Poems 6)

A religious vocabulary deployed at landscape, presented here as a cathedral, provides the poem's momentum. The poet ministers through song in a priestly way but without sermonizing. Philosophical enquiry works as gospel, rather than any declaration of faith or conventional belief. The presiding spirit is more Dylan Thomas than Christ. As a result, the benediction (a favorite word in the poet's lexicon) privileges art more than the life the art dramatizes God is present in what people do, in their patterns of behavior but God is absent in the behavior of the poet: there isn't a God as a given entity or assumed presence in the poet's procedure of writing the poem, although the language of God provides a vocabulary for the poet. This steers the reader toward the poetry as art and artifice, especially in the poem's metaphorical transformation of the ravaged city. The material reality of the city while reduced to ashes by the fire gives rise to the Phoenix of spiritual awakening. What the art achieves in the early poem is a sort of spiritual elation, and a peace in lieu of understanding but without the religious conversion of being saved, more like a drowning for the poet. The poem as a procedure carries with it a religiosity of a kind easily mistaken for faith in a conventional God. But it is more akin to the poet's identification with a literary tradition with Christianity as one of its cornerstones than any...