The Almond Trees

Derek Walcott

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1985

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Summary

Background

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Form

At first read, “The Almond Trees” appears to be anything but formally structured. The stanzas are obviously irregular, alternating between 4 and 5 lines apparently at random. The lines themselves are irregular in length, some lines are sentences, some fragments, some only two words. Some lines (even stanzas) move directly into the next (enjambment), while others close in end-punctuation. There is no reassuringly anticipated rhythm and certainly no evident rhyme scheme. The poem itself moves from image to image restlessly—the cold morning ocean to the old fisherman with his dog to the sea-almond trees to the brutal sun to the sunbathers. Yet much as the poem thematically argues the necessary and vital ties among those images, how they find their way to an organic whole by being so disparate, the form reveals a carefully balanced irregularity, intricately created to appear chaotic.

Thus, Walcott crafts poetry, his art, using the formal device of irregularity. The poem is both carefully designed and spontaneous. The poem draws on two distinctly different formal structures and yet resists any disruptive haphazard feeling. The outcome is a sense of fusion, which thematically relates to the Caribbean culture itself as it fuses the customs and traditions of its European roots and the lively animation of its indigenous identity.

Meter

Through meter, the carefully patterned manipulation of units of stressed and unstressed syllables within a line of verse, poets set language to music. Meter in turn creates a template for the poem’s recitation, providing a guide for how each line is to be spoken and heard. Because meter earns its value only through careful repetition of those units, the meter creates anticipation and renders the poem more accessible to be read, heard, and even memorized.

The simplest analysis of “The Almond Trees” is that it lacks meter. It almost mimics open verse, or free verse. Lines freely cascade one into the next, lines alternate lengths without clear syncopation, mimicking the rise and fall of ocean waves. Although the lines do lack regular patterns, the poem does create the aural effect typical of poetry through the quiet manipulation of long vowels, the plethora of sonorous sibilant s’s (for instance, “shapes amaze the sun” [Line 14]), lingering l’s, and the teasing lengths of n’s and m’s. In this, the poem directs the recitation to mimic the scene itself, the languorous afternoon at a tropical beach. Like tourists at a Caribbean beach, the poem forsakes the busyness implicit in set meter and finds its way to the quiet rhythms of the beach.

Voice

The voice reflects Walcott’s own rooted rootlessness. Although rooted in the Caribbean and its culture and emotionally committed to helping his long-suffering people rediscover their identity as the age of colonization finally collapsed of its own irony, Walcott here speaks in a voice defined and refined by his education deeply involved with the study of the traditions of European prosody. It is the voice that infuses the Caribbean scenes with elevated diction, elegant rhetorical flourishes (particularly a fondness for ornate figurative language that inevitably draws attention to the poet’s voice, or more specifically, the poets’ erudition, rather than the beach scene itself), and supremely a wide range of allusions with “Greek and Roman tags” (Line 36).

That voice captures the furnace-heat of a West Indian beach scattered with sunburned tourists but expresses that perception in the very European traditions that for centuries oppressed and brutalized that region. The voice is at once a part of the beach—detailing it with the generous open-eye of a painter—and apart from it, seeing in its elements suggestions of the grand myths of Europe. Thus, the voice is at once Caribbean and European. That voice reflects the “metamorphosis” (Line 49) that, ultimately, Walcott sees as the most promising voice of the contemporary Caribbean culture.