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Andrew Lewis
Dr. Howe
EN 200
10/07/08
Myths and their Truth-Value
The reader of Derek Walcott’s “Europa” is inevitably led to ask herself this question:
Can myths render forth truths about our world? For the poetic speaker, mythology offers
explanations that are neither empirically verifiable nor logically sound, and therefore
cannot be considered relevant or meaningful for people. Although Walcott’s retelling is
filled with wondrous imagery, the reader must look at the poem as a cynical response to the
traditional reverence and esteem held by literary minds for Classical mythology. Walcott is
very conscious of this pervasive paradigm in literature, and he looks to poke fun at the
ultimate irony of this ‘esteem’, which is: the rather unsound foundations for an unquestioned acceptance of these myths as “true.”
Perhaps Walcott’s poem is best understood as a contemporary reworking of “The
Rape of Europa,” a Greek myth in which a young princess is seduced by the god Zeus, who
whisks her away from her kingdom in the form of a bull to the distant island Crete, where
he proceeds to rape her. She bears him children, and her legacy lives on as the continent of
Europe is named after her.
The poem is ultimately ruled by the speaker’s cynical appraisal of Classical mythology, although the reader’s first impression of Derek Walcott’s rendering is as a beautiful
contemporary rendering of a traditional tale, and the form figures prominently in how the
speaker crafts her poem: while the first stanza can send the reader into euphoria, the
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second stanza can infuriate this same reader with its witty and cynical repudiation of the
invalidity present in the earlier stanza. The first stanza begins with a recurrent poetic motif:
hyperbolic images of a nocturnal, coastal world affected with life and light. These images
are fantastic red-flags for the Europa myth appearing later in the stanza, and the eerie,
magnificent full moon at the outset seems to have a resounding impression on the poetic
speaker, such that the speaker repeats this motif in successive lines with phrases like the
“luminously rumpled” clouds of lines five and six, or the speaker’s almost hallucinatory
expression of “feeling” his “mind whiten to moonlight” (8-9). It is even conceivable that
the poetic speaker hints at a kind of revelatory quality exuded by the “chaste moon” (16) of
the first stanza and the “moonshine” (20) of the second. This will be used to affect irony
later.
All of this imagery of the moon and the speaker in a nocturnal setting evokes powerful
images in the mind of the reader, and the “jeering clouds” (5) and the leaking stars of line
four are mythical, fantastic, even mystical images: when speaking of the “full moon”,
leaking stars, etc, the reader draws the inference that the speaker is either undergoing a
hallucination or enveloped inside an experience of the divine (although the latter of the two
he later derides as impossible), and the reader is sure that one of the two must be the case by
lines eleven through thirteen, where the poetic speaker begins to engage the vision of
Europa’s abduction. It is here where the reader encounters a cursory summary of the myth,
accompanied by more magnificent imagery. The events of the myth are not recited entirely,
and in fact the story of the infamous Rape only consists of eight or nine lines (!), filled
nonetheless with ethereal images (such as that “girl’s body bent in foam” [11] or of that
“chaste moon” that had “drawn the drapes of a dark cloud” [17]) that bring the reader to ask
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herself about her own memory of the traditional plot of the myth. In other words, Derek
Walcott presents the Greek myth in such a way that presents Europa not as a victim of rape,
but as a consenting participant in moment of spontaneous sexual passion between a deity
and a human.
Suddenly the reader is surprised by the second stanza: Is the speaker poking fun at the
whole scenario she generates? The reader until now has been caught up in wild mythical
images “seed-bulls” and “rutting swans” (20), but do not be deceived, says Walcott’s
poetic speaker: We always knew that these myths were “an overheated farmhand’s
literature” (22).This is where the speaker’s cynicism (that is, the deliberate rejection by our
speaker of the established truth and moreover relevance of myths as means of explanation)
kicks in, and the reader cannot mistake it to be anything else.
More, the speaker chidingly asks us: “Who ever saw her pale arms hook his horns…
her white flesh constellate to phosphorous as in salt darkness best and woman come?”
(23-26). The speaker is sure that such myths are wonderful, but they are clearly untrue. She
assures us: “Nothing is there, just as it always was” (27); These tales, myths, legends,
stories are classic, but for what reason? They hold no validity, no truth-value for this
speaker. The reader is left unimpressed by such a conclusion. Clearly, “facts” are not
the only kinds of things that matter. It is true, granted, that facts are important in our
correspondence with the world, and that getting the facts right matter. However, where do
the ‘facts’ fit in literature, where entire universes are generated by the pen of an author who
might not care whether or not the world of his art corresponds to ‘the facts’ of the real
world? For this speaker, these fairy tales are too inconsistent (in terms of logic) to be
meaningful, even if sound reasoning is not the point in imaginative literature.
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Works Cited:
Derek Walcott. “Europa” Gods and Mortals: Modern Poems on Classical Myths. Ed.
Nina Kossman. OUP, 2001. 22