Classic and Contemporary Poetry: Explained

In "Six Fictions: 1," Derek Walcott intricately explores the tension between reality and fiction, myth and meaning, through the lens of natural imagery. The poem begins by presenting the "first fiction" as a biblical plague of dragonflies that appear after heavy rains, resembling the locusts of biblical plagues. Walcott intertwines the natural world with literary and scriptural allusions, drawing attention to the way we impose narrative on events in order to extract meaning from them. The dragonflies, described in both mystical and ordinary terms, become symbolic of humanity’s need for plot, structure, and myth to understand the seemingly random events of life.

The first lines of the poem introduce the central image: a "biblical plague of dragonflies" crossing over bamboo after the rains, mistaken for locusts. This reference to a plague evokes the biblical story of Exodus, where plagues are seen as divine punishments. In Walcott’s poem, however, the plague is not locusts but dragonflies, which are typically harmless creatures. The fact that they are mistaken for something more ominous speaks to how easily humans attribute symbolic or prophetic meaning to natural events. The phrase "what magnifies their importance is plot" suggests that the dragonflies are significant only because we impose a narrative onto them—what makes them meaningful is not their presence but the story we tell about them. Walcott critiques the human tendency to create fictions out of natural phenomena, reminding us that this need for narrative can distort reality.

The next lines introduce a pastoral scene: horses stamping at gnats, the mingling scents of dung and drying grass, and the speaker observing the mountains "streaming from the sunlit door." These images create a sense of tranquility and natural order, emphasizing the calm and symmetry of the world. Yet, Walcott immediately questions the truth of this symmetry, asserting that "all fiction is lying." This line challenges the very nature of storytelling, suggesting that even the most symmetrical, well-constructed narrative is a form of deception. The fiction of a neatly ordered world is comforting, but it may obscure the more chaotic or incomprehensible aspects of existence.

Walcott’s speaker then expresses a desire for "a life without plot, a day without narrative." This wish for a plotless life reflects a yearning for a more authentic, unmediated experience of reality, one that is not filtered through the frameworks of story and meaning-making. However, even as the speaker prays for this simplicity, the dragonflies continue to drift "like a hive of adjectives loosened from a dictionary." This metaphor suggests that language and meaning are inescapable; the dragonflies, like adjectives, are the building blocks of description and narrative. They are compared to "bees from the hive of the brain," emphasizing how deeply ingrained the human impulse to create meaning is—just as bees produce honey, the brain produces stories.

As time passes, the dragonflies’ presence diminishes, their significance fading with them. The speaker reflects that their meaning is "no more than that they come after rain." This moment of realization strips away the layers of imposed meaning, leaving only the simple fact of their appearance. The dragonflies are neither a divine sign nor a plot device; they are just insects that follow the rains. This return to the mundane underscores the tension between our desire to find meaning in events and the often arbitrary nature of those events.

However, the dragonflies continue to evoke more than just their presence. They come "with the pestilential host of a prophet," summoning images of biblical affliction once again. The speaker cannot help but see them as messengers of some greater force, even though "what summoned their force is nowhere to be seen." The absence of a visible cause leaves the speaker—and humanity more broadly—grappling with the echoes of past wrongs and ancient afflictions. The dragonflies become "revisitants," symbolic creatures that remind us of our history, of the unresolved wrongs and transgressions that continue to haunt us.

In the poem's final lines, the dragonflies are described as "grenade-eyed and dragonish," evoking both warlike and mythical imagery. They are neither fully grounded in science nor in fiction, but exist in a liminal space between the two. Their presence is unsettling, as they seem to carry the weight of ancient history and myth, while simultaneously being ordinary creatures of the natural world. This duality reinforces the poem’s exploration of how humans struggle to balance the desire for narrative and meaning with the often arbitrary or unknowable aspects of life.

In "Six Fictions: 1," Derek Walcott masterfully examines the human tendency to impose stories on the world around us, blending biblical, literary, and natural imagery to explore the tension between fiction and reality. The dragonflies, initially imbued with symbolic meaning, ultimately become a reflection of the ways we try—and often fail—to make sense of the world. Through the poem’s shifting tone, from mystical to mundane, Walcott critiques the very act of storytelling, questioning whether the fictions we create can ever fully capture the complexity of existence. At the same time, the poem acknowledges the inevitability of narrative, suggesting that our need for meaning is as natural and persistent as the dragonflies that follow the rain.

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