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A Lesson for This Sunday

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Submitted By Fortislover1
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The growing idleness of summer grass
With its frail kites of furious butterflies
Requests the lemonade of simple praise
In scansion gentler than my hammock swings
And rituals no more upsetting than a
Black maid shaking linen as she sings
The plain notes of some Protestant hosanna--
Since I lie idling from the thought in things--

Or so they should, until I hear the cries
Of two small children hunting yellow wings,
Who break my Sabbath with the thought of sin.
Brother and sister, with a common pin,
Frowning like serious lepidopterists.
The little surgeon pierces the thin eyes.
Crouched on plump haunches, as a mantis prays
She shrieks to eviscerate its abdomen.
The lesson is the same.
The maid removes
Both prodigies from their interest in science.
The girl, in lemon frock, begins to scream
As the maimed, teetering thing attempts its flight.
She is herself a thing of summery light,
Frail as a flower in this blue August air,
Not marked for some late grief that cannot speak.

The mind swings inward on itself in fear
Swayed towards nausea from each normal sign.
Heredity of cruelty everywhere,
And everywhere the frocks of summer torn,
The long look back to see where choice is born,
As summer grass sways to the scythe’s design.

“A Lesson for This Sunday” from Collected Poems: 1948-1984 by Derek Walcott. Copyright © 1986 by Derek Walcott. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC.

A Lesson for This Sunday by Derek Walcott

The title of the poem hints that its focus is on a lesson to be learnt in the poem. The poem is about man’s cruelty to nature. The persona is lying on his hammock, relaxing and enjoying the tranquility and beauty of nature. Suddenly, the persona’s interaction with this paradise is interrupted by small children in stanza two. They chase and are successful in catching a butterfly, disemboweling it before

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