Nobel Prize-winning poet and playwright Derek Walcott's poem "White Egrets" is a thoughtful meditation on the fleeting qualities of human life juxtaposed with the violence of the natural world. The speaker observes a number of graceful birds, chief among them the titular white egrets, and reflects on how brief his own life appears in comparison to miracles of nature. Indeed, he contemplates mortality in several sections of the poem:
The egrets are the colour of waterfalls,
and of clouds. Some friends, the few I have left,
are dying, but the egrets stalk through the rain
as if nothing mortal can affect them, or they lift
like abrupt angels, sail, then settle again.
Here, the speaker acknowledges that the death of those he loves does not affect the natural world. The egrets are unconcerned with his issues. The world will carry on without him.
Interestingly, Walcott foregrounds the violence of nature in his reflection. The egrets are described as "stabbing" the earth. Spring, the season of rejuvenation and incipient growth, is portrayed as "igniting" flowers. In a key passage, the speaker observes a hawk hunting a small field mouse:
The page of the lawn and this open page are the same,
an egret astonishes the page, the high hawk caws
over a dead thing, a love that was pure punishment.
Walcott uses this violence to comment on the brevity of human life. In "White Egrets," Walcott emphasizes how fleeting life can be through his potent, brutal imagery.
I pulled my textual evidence from:
Derek Walcott's White Egrets: Poems
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