Derek Walcott - Crusoe's Journal

Crusoe's Journal (1965/1970)

I looked now upon the world as a thing remote, which I
had nothing to do with, no expectation from, and, indeed,
no desires about. In a word, I had nothing indeed
to do with it, nor was ever like to have; so I thought
it looked as we may perhaps look upon it hereafter,
viz., as a place I had lived in but was come out
of it; and well might I say, as Father Abraham
to Dives, "Between me and there is a great gulf fixed."
ROBINSON CRUSOE

Once we have driven past Mundo Nuevo trace
safely to this beat house
perched between ocean and green, churning forest
the intellect appraises
objects surely, even the bare necessities
of style are turned to use,
like those plain iron tools he salvages
from shipwreck, hewing a prose
as odorous as raw wood to the adze;
out of such timbers
came our first book, our profane Genesis
whose Adam speaks that prose
which, blessing some sea-rock, startles itself
with poetry's surprise,
in a green world, one without metaphors:
like Christofer he bears
in speech mnemonic as a missionary's
the Word to savages,
its shape an earthen, water-bearing vessel's
whose sprinkling alters us
into good Fridays who recite His praise,
parroting our master's
style and voice, we make his language ours
converted cannibals
we learn with him to eat the flesh of Christ.


All shapes, all objects multiplied from his,
our ocean's Proteus;
in childhood, his derelict's old age
was like a god's. (Now pass
in memory, I serene parenthesis,
the cliff-deep leeward coast
of my own island filing past the noise
of stuttering canvas,
some noon-struck village, Choiseul, Canaries,
crouched crocodile canoes,
a savage settlement from Henty's novels,
Marryat or R.L.S.,
with one boy signalling at the sea's edge,
though what he cried is lost.)
So time, that makes us objects, multiplies
our natural loneliness.


For the hermetic skill, that from earth's clays
shapes something without use,
and, separate from itself, lives somewhere else,
sharing with every beach
a longing for those gulls that cloud the cays
with raw, mimetic cries,
never surrenders wholly, for it knows
it needs another's praise
like hoary, half-cracked Ben Gunn, until it cries
at last, "O happy desert!"and learns again the self-creating peace
of islands. So from this house
that faces nothing but the sea, his journals
assume a household use;
we learn to shape from them, where nothing was
the language of a race,
and since the intellect demands its mask
that sun-cracked, bearded face
provides us with the wish to dramatize
ourselves at nature's cost,
to attempt a beard, to squint through the sea-haze,
exposing as naturalists,
drunks, castaways, beachcombers, all of us
yearn for those fantasies
of innocence, for our faith's arrested phase
when the clear voice
startled itself saying "water, heaven, Christ,"
hoarding such heresies as
God's loneliness moves in His smallest creatures.

Na? Wer versteht, um was es in dem Gedicht geht? (Es ist hilfreich die Geschichte von Robinson Crusoe zu kennen und der Hintergrund dieses Romans von Defoe ;o))