The Flock

This poem is about the imagination working through a metaphorical winter, or a difficult period of low inspiration.

The speaker compares winter to a blank page, while his thoughts flee like birds migrating towards a warmer sky. As winter causes flocks of ducks to take to the sky, the speaker compares them to “arrows of yearning” (Line 4)—they are not leaving merely because of instinct, but because they have an active desire to leave the cold and escape to “our tropic light” (Line 6). Most likely the phrase “our tropic light” (Line 6) alludes to Walcott’s place of birth, Saint Lucia and the Caribbean—the warm tropics where migrating birds go in the wintertime. In the next lines, the speaker compares his imagination to the birds. Like them, it too is flying away—a process that feels like an assault to the speaker, who shudders at the “violence / of images migrating from the mind” (Lines 7-8). Emptied and attacked, the speaker imagines a “sepulchral knight” riding through a “Skeletal forest” (Line 9) that symbolizes the death of the speaker’s normally lively inspiration.

Traditionally, winter is a season of death: “the white funeral of the year” (Line 12). At the same time, this is only a temporary death. However gloom-stricken, the knight continues to ride through the winter because he knows the season will not destroy him. Still, the winter seems overwhelming and passing through it feels like an ant crossing the “forehead of an alp” (Line 13). The knight is small in comparison to the grandness of the mountain, yet he refuses to give in. His will is “in iron contradiction crouched / against those gusts that urge the mallard south” (Lines 14-15): Unlike the birds, the knight steels his resolve to continue headlong into the wind. Whereas the mallards are heading south, this knight goes deeper into the snow, deeper into winter, deeper into potential death, desolation, and emptiness.

Next, the speaker makes a direct comparison between himself and the knight. Like the knight making tracks in the snow, “I travel through such silence, making dark / symbols with this pen’s print” (Lines 18-19). The pen marks he leaves on the page testify to his existence and personhood, much like the footprints the knight leaves behind. Bird imagery returns here, as the speaker describes measuring “winter’s augury” (Line 20)—an ancient technique to predict the future by interpreting the movement of birds. Here, instead of birds the poet-prophet uses “words” (Line 20) as his omens—and these words immediately become birds, settling “the branched mind” (Line 21). Like the ideal oracle, the speaker “never question[s] when they come or go” (Line 22). The speaker is a passive observer of his own mind, allowing his bird-words to fly at will. In the wintery landscape, the birds are signs of returning life.

In the next stanza the speaker considers the “world” (Line 24), which continuously changes as it revolves through seasons. The changes are so constant that the speaker describes them as “inflexible” (Line 24)—a paradox, or a seemingly self-contracting idea. This change does not refer only to the physical aspects of the globe but also to the movement of people and ideas on the surface of the Earth: “it revolves upon its centuries / with change of language, climate, customs, light” (Lines 25-26), as political boundaries and human cultures shift. What doesn’t seem to change as readily are personal ideas—“our own prepossession” (Line 27), or prejudices, might transform, but they will always “survive” (Line 29), along with our recurring dreams of flight and “our condemnation” (Line 29) of the fact that the Earth doesn’t stay stable.

Stanza three continues this meditation on the larger impersonal forces operating on the Earth. Calling to mind again the knight scaling the mountain, the speaker again turns to the vast desert of the Arctic—an “impartial” (Line 31), endlessly churning power that freezes even “giant minds” (Line 33) without pity or concern with “tireless, determined grace” (Line 34). The Arctic revolves upon an “iron axle” (Line 35), a description that connects to the two other prevailing images in the poem: The axle is as iron as the knight‘s “iron contradiction” (Line 14) of willpower, while the axle is an echo of the axis that the world spins around in its unchanging changeability. The speaker’s imagination feels like it is being frozen by the implacable and impersonal winter forces the same way that the brains of the mastodons literally froze in the Arctic ice. The Arctic offers the speaker no response: It is as indifferent to him as to the seals who “howl / with inhuman cries across its ice” (Line 36).

Again the speaker returns to the metaphor of his words as birds: “pages” of them have been “torn” and “are blown across / whitening tundras like engulfing snow (Lines 37-38) because they cannot survive in this frigid weather. When the imagination has been frozen and emptied by the winter, no matter how many pages the poet might fill, all the words will seem ripped up. All they can do is fill up the vast white snowy expanse of the Arctic, adding to its tundra landscape. The speaker will not create anything meaningful until the bird-words return.

In the fourth stanza the speaker wishes that his mind would, for as long as it exists, “Greet the black wings that cross it like a blessing” (Line 43)—he must welcome and appreciate the thoughts that cross the fixity of his mind. Without these bird-words flying freely, the page is a “cold sky” (Line 45). Ergo it is preferable to have birds and change, rather than to have a world that is only frozen solid.

In the last image of the birds “Flying by instinct to their secret places” (Line 47), the speaker personifies the birds, admitting that he doesn’t quite understand where they come from, where they are going, or why. This reflects the end of stanza one, where the speaker says he watches the birds but “never question[s] when they come and go” (Line 22). Still, although the speaker doesn’t fully understand where the birds of his imagination come from or know how to control them, they are there “Both for their need and for [his] sense of season” (Line 48). The speaker needs to know that the season of his imagination’s winter is shifting, and that, although the turning of the Earth is “inflexible” (Line 24), this change means that spring will always follow every winter.