Tiepolo's Hound

by Derek Walcott

• ISBN13: 9780374527792
• ISBN10: 0374527792
• Edition: Reprint
• Format: Trade Paper
• Copyright: 2001-05-15
• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Summary

From the Nobel laureate, a "resplently luminous" (Paul Gray,Time) book-length poem on two educations in painting, a century apart.Between me and Venice the thigh of a hound;my awe of the ordinary, because even as I write,paused on a step of this couplet, I have never foundits image again, a hound in astounding light.Tiepolo's Hound joins the quests of two Caribbean men. Camille Pissarro, born in 1830, leaves his native St. Thomas to follow his vocation as a painter in Paris. The poet himself hunts for a detail -- "a slash of pink on the inner thigh/of a white hound" -- of a Venetian painting encountered on an early visit from St. Lucia to New York. Both journeys take us through a Europe of the mind's eye, in search of a connection between the lost, actual landscape of a childhood and the mythical landscape of empire. Published with twenty-six of Derek Walcott's own paintings, the poem is at once the spiritual biography of a great artist in self-exile, a history in verse of Impressionist painting, and a memoir of the poet's desire to catch the visual world in more than words.

Author Biography

Derek Walcott was born in St. Lucia in 1930. His Collected Poems: 1948-1984 was published by FSG in 1986; his subsequent works include the book-length poem Omeros and The Bounty. He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1992.

Excerpts

Chapter One

1

They stroll on Sundays down Dronningens Street,

passing the bank and the small island shops

quiet as drawings, keeping from the heat

through Danish arches until, the street stops

at the blue, gusting harbour, where like commas

in a shop ledger gulls tick the lined waves.

Sea-light on the cod barrels writes: St. Thomas ,

the salt breeze brings the sound of Mission slaves

chanting deliverance from all their sins

in tidal couplets of lament and answer,

the horizon underlines their origins--

Pissarros from the ghetto of Braganza

who fled the white hoods of the Inquisition

for the bay's whitecaps, for the folding cross

of a white herring gull over the Mission

droning its passages from Exodus.

Before the family warehouse, near the Customs,

his uncle jerks the locks, rattling their chains,

and lifts his beard to where morning comes

across wide water to the Gentile mountains.

Out of the cobalt bay, her blunt bow cleaving

the rising swell that racing bitterns skip,

the mail boat moans. They feel their bodies leaving

the gliding island, not the blowing ship.

A mongrel follows them, black as its shadow,

nosing their shadows, scuttling when the bells

exult with pardon. Young Camille Pissarro

studies the schooners in their stagnant smells.

He and his starched Sephardic family,

followed from a nervous distance by the hound,

retrace their stroll through Charlotte Amalie

in silence as its Christian bells resound,

sprinkling the cobbles of Dronningens Gade,

the shops whose jalousies in blessing close,

through repetitions of the oval shade

of Danish arches to their high wooden house.

The Synagogue of Blessing and Peace and Loving Deeds

is shut for this Sabbath. The mongrel cowers

through a park's railing. The bells recede.

The afternoon is marked by cedar flowers.

Their street of letters fades, this page of print

in the bleached light of last century recalls

with the sharp memory of a mezzotint:

days of cane carts, the palms' high parasols.

2

My wooden window frames the Sunday street

which a black dog crosses into Woodford Square.

From a stone church, tribal voices repeat

the tidal couplets of lament and prayer.

Behind the rusted lances of a railing

stands the green ribbed fan of a Traveller's Tree;

an iron gate, its croton hedge availing

itself of every hue, screeches on entry.

Walk down the path, enter the yawning stone,

its walls as bare as any synagogue

of painted images. The black congregation

frown in the sun at the sepulchral dog.

There was a shul in old-time Port of Spain,

but where its site precisely was is lost

in the sunlit net of maps whose lanes contain

a spectral faith, white as the mongrel's ghost.

Stiller the palms on Sunday, fiercer the grass,

blacker the shade under the boiling trees,

sharper the shadows, quieter the grace

of afternoon, the city's emptiness.

And over the low hills there is the haze

of heat and a smell of rain in the noise

of trees lightly thrashing where one drop has

singed the scorched asphalt as more petals rise.

A silent city, blest with emptiness

like an engraving. Ornate fretwork eaves,

and the heat rising front the pitch in wires,

from empty back yards with calm breadfruit leaves,

their walls plastered with silence, the same streets

with the same sharp shadows, laced verandahs closed

in torpor, until afternoon repeats

the long light with its croton-coloured crowds

in the Savannah, not the Tuileries, but

still the Rock Gardens' brush-point cypresses

like a Pissarro canvas, past the shut

gate of the President's Palace, flecked dresses

with gull cries, white flowers and cricketers,

coconut carts, a frilled child with the hoop

of the last century, and, just as it was

in Charlotte Amalie, a slowly creaking sloop.

Laventille's speckled roofs, just as it was

in Cazabon's day, the great Savannah cedars,

the silent lanes at sunrise, parked cars

quiet at their culverts, trainers, owners, breeders

before they moved the paddocks, the low roofs

under the low hills, the sun-sleeved Savannah

under the elegance of grass-muffled hooves,

the cantering snort, the necks reined in; a

joy that was all smell, fresh dung; the jokes

of the Indian grooms, that civilising

culture of horses, the fin de siècle spokes

of trotting carriages, and egrets rising,

as across olive hills a flock of pigeons,

keeping its wide ellipse over dark trees

to the Five Islands, soundlessly joins

its white flecks to the sails on quiet seas.

The white line of chalk birds draws on an Asia

of white-lime walls, prayer flags, and minarets,

blackbirds bring Guinea to thorns of acacia,

and in the saffron of Tiepolo sunsets,

the turbulent paradise of bright rotundas

over aisles of cane, and censer-carried mists,

then, blazing from the ridges of Maracas--

the croton hues of the Impressionists.

3

On my first trip to the Modern I turned a corner,

rooted before the ridged linen of a Cézanne.

A still life. I thought how clean his brushes were!

Across that distance light was my first lesson.

I remember stairs in couplets. The Metropolitan's

marble authority, I remember being

stunned as I studied the exact expanse

of a Renaissance feast, the art of seeing.

Then I caught a slash of pink on the inner thigh

of a white hound entering the cave of a table,

so exact in its lucency at The Feast of Levi ,

I felt my heart halt. Nothing, not the babble

of the unheard roar that rose from the rich

pearl-lights embroidered on ballooning sleeves,

sharp beards, and gaping goblets, matched the bitch

nosing a forest of hose. So a miracle leaves

its frame, and one epiphanic detail

illuminates an entire epoch:

a medal by Holbein, a Vermeer earring, every scale

of a walking mackerel by Bosch, their sacred shock.

Between me and Venice the thigh of a hound;

my awe of the ordinary, because even as I write,

paused on a step of this couplet, I have never found

its image again, a hound in astounding light.

Everything blurs. Even its painter. Veronese

or Tiepolo in a turmoil of gesturing flesh,

drapery, columns, arches, a crowded terrace,

a balustrade with leaning figures. In the mesh

of Venetian light on its pillared arches

Paolo Veronese's Feast in the House of Levi

opens on a soundless page, but no shaft catches

my memory: one stroke for a dog's thigh!

4

But isn't that the exact perspective of loss,

that the loved one's features blur, in dimming detail,

the smile with its dimpled corners, her teasing voice

rasping with affection, as Time draws its veil,

until all you remember are her young knees

gleaming from an olive dress, her way of walking,

as if on a page of self-arranging trees,

hair a gold knot, rose petals silently talking?

I catch an emerald sleeve, light knits her hair,

in a garland of sculpted braids, her burnt cheeks;

catch her sweet breath, be the blest one near her

at that Lucullan table, lean when she speaks,

as clouds of centuries pass over the brilliant ground

of the fresco's meats and linen, while her wrist

in my forced memory caresses an arched hound,

as all its figures melt in the fresco's mist.

Copyright © 2000 Derek Walcott. All rights reserved.