In a Green Night
Derek Walcott (1930-2017)
The orange tree, in varying light,
Proclaims her fable perfect now
That her last season’s summer height
Bends from each overburdened bough.
She has her winters and her spring,
Her moult of leaves, which, in their fall
Reveal, as with each living thing,
Zones truer than the tropical.
For if at night each orange sun
Burns with a comfortable creed,
By noon harsh fires have begun
To quail those splendours which they feed;
Or mixtures of the dew and dust
That early shone her orbs of brass
Mottle her splendor with the rust
She seemed all summer to surpass.
By such strange, cyclic chemistry
Which dooms and glories her at once
As green yet ageing orange tree
The mind enspheres all circumstance.
No Florida, loud with citron leaves,
Nor crystal falls to heal an age
Shall calm our natural fear which grieves
The loss of visionary rage.
Yet neither shall despairing blight
The nature ripening into art,
Nor the fierce noon or lampless night
Wither the comprehending heart.
The orange tree, in varying light
Proclaims her fable perfect now
That her last season’s summer height
Bends from each overburdened bough.
(1960)
***
Ecclesiastes 3:1-9 (NIV)
What do people gain from all their labors
at which they toil under the sun?
Generations come and generations go,
but the earth remains forever.
The sun rises and the sun sets,
and hurries back to where it rises.
The wind blows to the south
and turns to the north;
round and round it goes,
ever returning on its course.
All streams flow into the sea,
yet the sea is never full.
To the place the streams come from,
there they return again.
All things are wearisome,
more than one can say.
The eye never has enough of seeing,
nor the ear its fill of hearing.
What has been will be again,
what has been done will be done again;
there is nothing new under the sun.
***
***
Derek Walcott was a noted Anglophone poet from the Caribbean, a recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature, an essayist, and a teacher. Of mixed African, Dutch, and English heritage, Walcott’s writing practice was enlivened by the intertwining threads of his ancestry, as well as the immediacy of bringing a new culture out of the detritus of indigenous genocide in the Caribbean. In shaping the English language to the islands in which he was raised, Walcott sought to write ‘Verse crisp as sand, clear as sunlight / Cold as the curled wave, ordinary / As a tumbler of island water’, a style that suits its environs.
Raised as part of Saint Lucia’s Methodist minority against a ‘prejudiced, medieval, almost hounding kind of Catholicism’, Walcott saw poetry as a kind of priesthood to be pursued, anointed with a kind of divine import, a religious vocation dedicated to inscribing ‘a sense of gratitude both for what you feel is a gift and for the beauty of the earth’. Yet, in his poem ‘In a Green Night’, the kind of beauty that Walcott captures is engaged in a fraught tussle with the reality of decay.
The poem depicts an orange tree in the midst of deterioration and hardship. The tree, far from ‘last season’s summer height’, instead ‘Bends from each overburdened bough. There is a heaviness to Walcott’s description, one that echoes and resists the bounteous harvest of John Keats’ ‘To Autumn’ (1820). Walcott articulates this through ‘Her moult of leaves’ that reveal ‘Zones truer than the tropical’, addressing the shocks experienced by the tree under the harsh Caribbean climate.
This contradictory sense of an environment that nourishes and punishes is further shown through the ‘dew and dust’ that ‘[mottles]’ her ‘splendor with the rust’, dismantling the false hope of shining oranges, or ‘orbs of brass.’ Walcott describes this contradiction as ‘strange, cyclic chemistry / That dooms and glories her at once’, a set of redemptive, reconciliatory possibilities.
The cyclical nature of flourishing and suffering, ripening and pressure, described in Walcott’s poem invariably reminded me of the book of Ecclesiastes. There are echoes of toiling ‘under the sun’ in Walcott’s image of each ‘overburdened bough’, as are there echoes of the passage of day and night, season by season. The cynicism of the wise man in Ecclesiastes is expressed toward the banality and repetitiveness of earthly experience: ‘What has been will be again […] there is nothing new under the sun’. Such reminders are not necessarily just of the mundanity of that which we experience on earth, but perhaps the slight comfort in knowing that the constancy of the old hurts of earthly experience are mirrored in the constancy of God’s salvific, gracious character.
In moments where we may feel burdened, overwhelmed, or weary because of the things of the world, what draws us back into remembering the active, consistent presence of God?
***
© 1966 Derek Walcott