19 pages • 38 minutes read
Derek WalcottRuins of a Great House
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1953A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
The Great House
The ruins of the great house are a symbol of both colonialism and the canon of English literature. The poem establishes the metaphor for the Great House as a body in the first stanza (“Stones only, the disjecta membra of this Great House,” Line 1). Walcott suggests that the house is like a dismembered human corpse, its limbs strewn across the lawn. This violent imagery suggests how colonialism inflicted trauma and abuse on those it colonized. But ironically, in attempting to subjugate others, these great colonial powers eventually lost control. Bits and pieces of their once-great empire were scattered across the globe like the stones of the great house strewn across the lawn.
On a more personal level for the speaker, the estate is a symbol of the legacy of English literature. On one hand, England was a destructive colonial presence in the Caribbean. On the other, England and English speakers created a canon of literature that deeply impacted how the speaker interprets the world. Thus, ultimately, the great house in shambles becomes both a sign of victory and defeat for the speaker: The colonizers have been removed from the Caribbean, but their cultural impact on the landscape—and its people—has left a permanent mark.
Limes
The poem mentions the fruit grown on the plantation twice, once in the first stanza (“A smell of dead limes quickens in the nose,” Line 9) and again in the third stanza (“It seems that the original crops were limes,” Line 19). The limes are significant because they are a fruit that fortifies sailors at sea. Scurvy was a common illness that plagued sailors with insufficient vitamin C in their diet. Therefore, the limes grown on the plantation would have directly fortified the pirates and slave traders who implemented much of the trauma decreed by colonial empires. Thus, the deep and painful irony of this plantation is twofold: Not only did the profits produced by this crop fund the oppressors, but the produce itself also aided in the continued enslavement and subjugation of the people who grew them.
Faulkner’s South
William Faulkner was a writer and poet during the early 1900s known for writing in the Southern Gothic tradition. His work can also be considered Modernist because of its use of nontraditional forms like stream of consciousness. The Gothic tradition in literature is concerned with horror, death, and romance as characterized by the setting of Gothic architecture. The looming physical structures and buildings within the environment of Gothic literature are a defining aspect of the genre. For Faulkner's style of Southern Gothic, the “architecture” represented negative hierarchical systems and institutions like racism, segregation, inequality, Jim Crow laws, Christianity, and classism. These systems maintained the status quo of “Old South” southern culture. When Walcott references “Faulkner’s South in stone” (Line 13), he references this apparatus. In comparing the ruins to Faulkner's South, he is making a direct comparison to both the literary tradition of the Southern Gothic and a statement about racist, oppressive systems upheld by a history of slavery and violence.
Related Titles
By Derek Walcott
