Derek Walcott on Jean Rhys

Since Derek Walcott was taken off the reading list, I've been pouting as I bought the book.  So while I was thumbing through my copy of Wide Sargasso Sea, I found this poem in the back and I thought I'd share it with you.  If I understand it correctly, the speaker is looking at a photograph and imagining what Jean Rhys's world was like and how the conception of this novel was engendered.  There appears to be allusions to events or places in Rhys's life upon which Brooke might be able to shed some light?

Jean Rhys

In their faint photographs

mottled with chemicals,

like the left hand of some spinster aunt,

they have drifted to the edge

of verandahs in Whistlerian

white, their jungle turned tea-brown--

even its spiked palms --

their features pale,

to be pencilled in:

bone-collared gentlemen

with spiked moustaches

and their wives embayed in the wickerwork

armchairs, all looking coloured

from the distance of a century

beginning to groan sideways from the axe stroke!

Their bay horses blacken

like spaniels, the front lawn a beige 

carpet, brown moonlight and a moon

so sallow, so pharmaceutical

that her face is a feverish child's,

some malarial angel

whose grave still cowers

under a fury of bush,

a mania of wild yams

wrangling to hide her from ancestral churchyards.

And the sigh of that child

is white as an orchid

on a crusted log

in the bush of Dominica,

a V of Chinese white

meant for the beat of a seagull

over a sepia of Cornwall, 

as the white hush between two sentences.

Sundays!  Their furnace

of boredom after church.

A maiden aunt canoes through lilies of clouds 

in a Carib hammock, to a hymn's metronome,

and the child on the varnished, lion-footed couch

sees the hills dip and straighten with each lurch.

The green-leaved uproar of the century

turns dim as the Atlantic, a rumourous haze

behind the lime trees, breakers

advancing in decorous, pleated lace;

the cement grindstone of the afternoon

turns slowly, sharpening her sense,

the bay below is green as calalu, stewing Sargasso.

In that fierce hush

between Dominican mountains

the child expects a sound

from a butterfly clipping itself to a bush

like a gold earring to a black maid's ear--

one who goes down to the village, visiting,

whose pink dress wilts like a flower between the limes.

There are logs

wrinkled like the hand of an old woman

who wrote with a fine courtesy of that world

when grace was common as malaria,

when the gas lanterns' hiss on the verandah

drew the aunts out like moths

doomed to be pressed in a book, to fall

into the brown oblivion of an album,

embroiderers of silence

for whom the arches of the Thames,

Parliament's needles,

and the petit-point reflections of London Bridge

fade on the hammock cushions from the sun,

where one night

a child stares at the windless candles flame

from the corner of a lion-footed couch

at the erect white light,

her right hand married to Jane Eyre,

foreseeing that her own white wedding dress

will be white paper.