"Hic Jacet" by Derek Walcott

I have always scribbled notes in collections of poems while I am reading them. A curious entertainment for me is to return to books and see what I thought about certain poems. Often I realize how much I completely misunderstood a poem, and at times I see scribbled my own meditations art the time which bear only tangential relevance to the poem at hand. I have a worn hard cover copy of the first edition of Derek Walcott’s The Gulf with the huge picture of Walcott’s assured chin, dark curls and brooding eyes on the back. He looks all of the poet and quite seventies with his extended sideburns. My notes are in a ball point pen all over the collection. Sometimes the comments are amusing, other times I am annoyed at not getting something, and more often than not I seem to be making notes for a class discussion—hoping to sound intelligent among fellow students. “Hic Jacet” is the final poem in the collection. I have marked off the penultimate stanza and written “This is the theme.”:
Convinced of the power of provincialism,
I yielded quietly my knowledge of the world
to a grey tup steaming with clouds of seraphim,
the angels and flags of the world,
and answer those who hiss, like steam, of exile,
this coarse sop-smelling truth:

The back story here is that Walcott, unlike many of his contemporaries, did not travel to the UK to become a writer. he stayed at home and he wrote. We sometimes saw this as a noble act, a clear declaration that one did not have to leave to be successful. Walcott, also, would talk about this as something of a badge of honor. He did not leave the Caribbean until he was well into his forties, and the triumphant story is that , yes he did make it. But in his poetic telling, Walcott is not so heroic, and he does not hide his bitterness which some might even want to call jealousy of those who left and had a quick time of gaining fame while Walcott labored in theater in the Caribbean. "Hic Jacet", then, is a poem that reveals a strikingly honest debunking of the myth of heroism and nobility. This self-penned grave inscription is indulgent, kind of funny, and decidedly bitter and the better for it.
I knew then that somewhere in this somewhat bitter stanza rested an emotional center to the poem that offered me the tone and ultimately a sense of the poet. I could have missed this since at the time I was reading poetry that was less lyrical, less engaged with the complexity of confession and anger about the personal, and more interested in the larger politics, in the history of community, in the world writ large.
So I come back to this poem when I need to be reminded of Walcott’s humanity, his capacity to contradict himself and to stare at the ironies of his indulgences as a human and as a poet. The poem begins with the suggestion that he will tell us why he stayed, why he never left the West Indies. He never does tell us why. That is something we will find out from the biographies. What we do find out is what he thinks about not having left. What we discover is that the question of departure and staying is a huge one for Walcott. It embraces issues of failure, identity, place, and the value of art.
There is a veritable catalog of figures he does not like in this poem—the politicians, the hungry thousands, the homecoming lecturer, the frock-coated “new race of dung beetles”, the winter-bitten novelist and those who “hiss… of exile” (probably the same as the novelists). His love, on the other hand, is reserved for the myth of home, for place, for names:
I loved them all, the names
of shingled, rusting towns, whose dawn
touches like metal,
One, of course, wants to think of the poet who “stays” as one who stays for the love of the people, but Walcott’s people are, in this poem, quite faceless and not especially endearing. Walcott is determined to completely upturn the myth of nobility and patriotism, and to, instead, speak of the business of poetry as the stuff of venal ambition and desire, a crass calculation that has to be unsettling. So that when we come to the final stanza, after he has lambasted as false those novelists who moved to England to enjoy the “barge-burdened river”, he offers that the circumstances that did not allow him to be one of that crowd of West Indian writers who did travel to the UK to write as authors in exile (Lamming, Naipaul, Salkey, Selvon, Dawes, Patterson, et al) gave him something of an unexpected blessing—a benediction of rebirth to be found in his ability to lose himself in the crowd of home:
I sought more power than you, more fame than yours,
I was more hermetic, I knew the commonweal,
I pretended subtly to lose myself in crowds
knowing my passage would alter their reflection,
I was that muscle shouldering the grass
through ordinary earth,
commoner than water I sank to lose my name,
this was my second birth.
Here the sham of the artist of the people is confessed, and the raw ambition of the poet is also expressed. It will not be the only time that Walcott would talk about his ambition as a poet, and in this kind of confession, Walcott is fairly unique as a West Indian poet of his generation. Which is perhaps why I like the poem, or at least why I return to the poem. Perhaps I came to it because it stood as a warning for those who remained behind--a cynics warning that staying behind for noble is not a good idea. Walcott's The Gulf would mark the beginning of his movement away from the region. It is his apologia, his farewell.
It is not his greatest poem, not by any means, what with that din of “thats” in the second stanza—a sometimes tuneless use of syntax that Walcott would eventually avoid with greater consistency in later works. Still, in its risk-taking and honesty, I find it a refreshing poem, and all this while having not understood every image and idea running through the piece.