Goats and Monkeys
'...even now, an old black ram
is tupping your white ewe.'
-Othello
The owl's torches gutter. Chaos clouds the globe.
Shriek, augury! His earthen bulk
buries her bosom in its slow eclipse.
His smoky hand has charred
that marble throat. Bent to her lips,
he is Africa, a vast, sidling shadow
that halves your world with doubt.
'Put out the light', and God's light is put out.
That flame extinct, she contemplates her dream
of him as huge as night, as bodiless,
as starred with medals, like the moon
a fable of blind stone.
Dazzled by that bull's bulk agaisnt the sun
of Cyprus, couldn't she have known
like Pasiphae, poor girl, she'd breed horned monsters?
That like Euyridice, her flesh a flare
travelling the hellish labyrinth of his mind
his soul would swallow hers?
Her white flesh rhymes with night. She climbs, secure.
Virgin and ape, maid and malevolent Moor,
their immortal coupling still halves our world.
He is your sacrificial beat, bellowing, goaded,
a black bull snarled in ribbons of blood.
And yet, whatever fury girded
on the saffron-sunset turban, moon-shaped sword
was not his racial, panther-black revenge
pulsing her chamber with its raw musk, its sweat
but horror of the moon's change,
of the corruption of an absolute,
like a white fruit
pulped ripe by fondling but doubly sweet.
And so he barbarously arraigns the moon
for all she has beheld since time began
for his own night-long lechery, ambition,
while barren innocence whimpers for pardon.
And it is still the moon, she silvers love,
limns lechery and stares at our disgrace.
Only annihilation can resolve
the pure corruption in her dreaming face.
A bestial, comic agony. We harden
with mockery at this blackamoor
who turns his back on her, who kills
what, like the clear moon, cannot abhor
her element, night; his grief
farcially knotted in a handkerchief
a sibyl's
prophetically stitched rememberancer
webbed and embroidered with the zodiac,
this mythical, horned beast who's no more
monstrous for being black.
Commentary
Walcott is West Indian, from the island of St. Lucia. He came from a mixed family, with two white grandfathers and two black grandmothers. He grew up familiar with English and his problem is one faced by most post-colonial writers, he does not fit in the native tradition but he does not fit in the British traditon, and he is troubled both by his ease with the English language and his alienation from English experience.
This poem rewrites Othello, and it is really interesting because its sympathetic to Othello while still granting him agency, Walcott completely deletes Iago and Othello is no longer a pawn.
What I love most about Walcott is his almost intoxicating use of imagery. He does go overboard in one or two places, but most of the time he manages to pick the most evocative images to convey impressions. Call him impressionist if you wish!
Minstrels Links
Derek Walcott:
Poem #993: “Midsummer, Tobago”
Poem #1041: “The Schooner ‘Flight’”
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From the Wondering Minstrels mailing list, 1999–2008.
Matt Chanoff · 6 August 2003
I loved the first two stanzas of this. At first I thought I was reading some piece from Shakespeare’s Othello that I didn’t remember – maybe just my own poetic incompetence, but still, high praise. At the same time, the opening reminded me of Yeats – Turning and turning in a widening gyre…” (something like that).
But with “ Virgin and ape, maid and malevolent Moor,…” I think Walcott starts to go wrong. Both the virgin and ape trope and the “maid and malevolent Moor” alliteration are just a bit tone-deaf, a bit over the top.
Likewise, I think the extended moon metaphore, beginning with “ And so he barbarously arraigns the moon …” works less and less well. In the earlier sections, the sun, moon, earth, and firmament metaphores work well partly because they are fluid, played loosely. But beginning here, it takes on the character of a schoolbook simile: she is like the moon. Just like the moon she does this and that, bla bla bla. It’s strained and faintly embarrasing.
Still, the thing is shot through with pretty phrases and imagery. Also, I kind of like the title, even though it doesn’t fit at all (Monkeys? Or is Othello the goat and Desdemona the monkey? And why plural?)
Matt
Stephen Pecha · 7 August 2003
Act IV–Othello, after striking Desdemona in a jealous fit, in front of newly arrrived officers from Venice, bids them to dine with him that night, and concludes “Welcome to Cyrpus–goats and monkeys!”