19 pages • 38 minutes read
The Flock
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Themes
Displacement and Isolation
“The Flock” begins with ducks, like “arrows of yearning” (Line 4), being shot from the reeds because they long for “our different sky” (Line 4). With this opening image Walcott introduces a recurring theme of displacement: “our different sky” is the sky of the tropics, which belongs to him and others born in the Caribbean. Needless to say this sky is also warmer and more welcoming during the winter months, attracting migratory birds like the blue-teal and mallard. Yet, unlike these birds, the speaker cannot easily escape to his homeland. This causes him pain and evokes feelings of drudgery, which are embodied by the image of the knight crossing a snowy alp in winter.
Perhaps the most wretched image in this poem is that of the “sepulchral knight” (Line 9) who trudges through the “white funeral of the year” (Line 12) to a “black tarn’s edge” (Line 10). The speaker pictures himself as this knight:
I travel through such silence, making dark
symbols with this pen’s print, across snow,
measuring winter’s augury by words (Lines 18-20)
The knight is not heading south, but rather moving further and further against the wind, as though attempting to contravene nature, which pushes the poem’s other living beings, the ducks, instinctively southward. Although the task seems daunting and the knight feels like an ant taking on the Alps, he forges ahead.
For the speaker the task of writing through the winter is tantamount to that of the beleaguered knight crossing a mountain range. Though it is isolating and difficult, the speaker nevertheless persists, “measuring winter’s augury by words” (Line 20). Though he is alone now, his work will turn into the birds that herald spring. The speaker is resilient, while also being resigned to the inevitability of the seasons.
Fixity and Change
In the second and third stanzas the speaker veers away from the personal mental and emotional struggle presented in the figure of the “sepulchral knight” (Line 9), and focuses on the turning of the world. Human life on Earth always evolves—a process of change that is paradoxically rigid in its inevitability. The fixity of this movement is an inevitable fact of nature, and there is no point in fighting against it: Just as winter will inevitably turn to spring, so human culture will always change.
A similar, though slightly smaller force is the “dark, impartial Arctic” (Line 31), which paradoxically freezes mastodons into incapacity while it ceaselessly “revolves with tireless, determined grace” (Line 34). Its implacability can keep people and culture from moving forward, trapping “giant minds in marble attitudes” (Line 33). The reference to marble echoes the statuary of the Ancient Greeks and Romans, whose pervasive cultural has lasted through centuries: European writers often reference those statues and the stories they portray. Yet the ancient cultures did eventually crumble, giving rise to new empires. Just as winter eventually ends, cultures rise and fall with the turning of the globe and the churning of the Arctic.
Thought the globe and the Arctic revolve indefinitely, for the individual, the many changing seasons eventually mean death. Until that time, the speaker wishes to be clear-eyed in his understanding of the world around him:
Till its annihilation may the mind
reflect his fixity through winter, tropic,
until that equinox when the clear eye
clouds, like a mirror, without contradiction (Lines 39-42)
The “equinox” is the point of the year when a season reaches its apex and begins to wane. Only in death do the contradictions end; thus, the constant flux is a sign of life. Because the speaker loves life, he ultimately treats the shifts as a “blessing” (Line 43) which allows him to know that life is still moving.
The Power of Literature and Life of the Mind
“The Flock” is a form of Ars Poetica, or a poem about the writing of poetry. The poem’s only action is in its metaphors, which offer comparisons to the speaker’s emotional and intellectual struggle to come to terms with a period of fallow imagination: “a violence / of images migrating from the mind” (Lines 7-8) just as ducks migrate south for the winter. This sudden dearth of creative impulse amodt physically assaults him; his new task of finding ways to write through this winter of the soul makes him picture a beleaguered knight climbing a snow-capped mountain.
The speaker situates himself as an observer, a stationary force who receives images, rather than the creator of the images themselves. Yet he is not entirely passive. By comparing his writing to the “print, across snow” (Line 19) left by the knight, he makes the process akin to the kind of holy quest that a knight would undertake.
The speaker’s task is to traverse the silence of winter, making something out of nothing, creating out of isolation. The speaker needs to work through difficulties that seem insurmountable. The flock of the poem’s title refers to the speaker’s fleeing and ungovernable thoughts, which migrate through his mind like birds, while he waits for their return with the coming spring—a thawing of his creative drive. Though these returning thoughts are made up of multiple influences that “settl[e] the branched mind” (Line 21) in a cacophony, the speaker calls them “a blessing” (Line 43): His mind’s ability to move through these varied ideas and words gives the speaker the feeling that life is happening. Yet, by necessity, his “flock” must remain mysterious: The birds are “flying by instinct to their secret places / both for their need and for my sense of season” (Lines 47 and 48). The speaker does not control his inspiration, but merely seeks to record it.
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By Derek Walcott
