A Careful Passion

Walcott’s poem, “A Careful Passion,” offers insight into the speaker’s frame of mind beginning with the title. The seemingly oxymoronic phrase underscores the speaker’s feelings of detachment and disillusionment that crop up later in the poem and prepare the reader to expect a poem not about a frenzied relationship between lovers, but something more mediated and ambivalent. Walcott places an epigraph immediately following the title, lines from a Jamaican song: “Hosanna, I build me house, Lawd, / De rain come wash it ‘way.” The song alludes to the Biblical story of the man who, after hearing the words of Jesus, chooses to ignore them and build his house on sand, as opposed to the man who built a house on rock. The house on sand collapses when the storms come. By placing the song lyrics at the beginning of the poem, Walcott further alludes to the problematic nature of the relationship he is about to reveal in the poem.

The poem begins with a simple and clear Caribbean setting, and Walcott spends multiple lines describing the scenery: “The Cruise Inn, at the city’s edge / Extends a breezy prospect of the sea / From