Trust the Tale

This is the right light, this pewter shine on the water,
not the carnage of clouds, not the expected wonder
of self-igniting truth and oracular rains,
but these shallows as gentle as the voice of your daughter,
while the gods fade like thunder in the rattling mountains.

---The Bounty, Derek Walcott[1]

The twilight (pewter shine) in this poem “says” that the sea (“let your knuckled toes root deep in their own soil”) should be where the Caribbean person’s roots are. And also that these gentle shallows (“...as gentle as the voice of your daughter”) will lead while “the gods (lower case) fade like thunder in the rattling mountains (parenthesis added).” Here, Walcott again rejects the concept of "history as deity" and instead dismisses it as thunder (powerful but quick to fade away). This cements Walcott’s dualistic idea that the sea is history (meaning literally that the sea holds the graves, the memories, and the stories of his people) but also that history is like the sea: forever changing, unidentifiable, and unwilling to be conquered.

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[1] Walcott, Derek. The Bounty: Poems. New York: Farrar,, Straus, and Giroux, 1997. All quotes from this poem come from page 37 of Walcott’s Poem “The Bounty.”