"42, for Lorna Goodison" by Derek Walcott & the "Envy Test"

In “42, for Lorna Goodison” published last week in The Guardian, Derek Walcott was up to one of his old tricks: a thematic variation on the trope of the landscape as text. 

And, yes, I had to work through what Seamus Heaney calls the "envy test" with the formal aspects of the poem: the casual flow of the rhyme scheme (abab, cdcd, efef, ghgh, ijjhi) and his rhyming of “Presbyterian” with “terrain” and “dressmaker” and “Jamaica.”

What a wicked man, eh?

42

for Lorna Goodison

This prose has the gait of a mule urged up a mountain road,
a slope with wild strawberries; yes, strawberries grow there,
and pines also flourish; native trees from abroad,
and coffee-bush shining in the crisp blue air
fanning the thighs of the mountains. Pernicious ginger
startles around corners and crushed lime
leaves its memory on thumb and third finger,
each page has a freshness of girlhood's time,
when, by a meagre brook the white scream
of an egret beats with the same rhythm as crows
circling invisible carrion in their wide dream;
commas sprout like thorn-bush alongside this curved prose
descending into some village named Harvey River
whose fences are Protestant. A fine Presbyterian
drizzle blesses each pen with its wooden steeple over
baking zinc roofs. Adjectives are modestly raised in this terrain,
this side-saddle prose on its way to the dressmaker
passes small fretwork balconies, drying clothes
in a yard fragrant as Monday; this prose
has the sudden smell of a gust of slanted rain
on scorching asphalt from the hazed hills of Jamaica.

From White Egrets.

***

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