Derek Walcott

There is a force of exultation, a celebration of luck, when a writer finds himself a witness to the early morning of a culture that is defining itself, branch by branch, leaf by leaf, in that self-defining dawn," Derek Walcott said in his Nobel Prize lecture for 1992. That force of exultation and celebration of luck, along with a sense of benediction and obligation, a continuous effort of memory and excavation, and a "frightening duty" to "a fresh language and a fresh people," have defined Walcott’s work for the past 50 years. He has always been a poet of great verbal resources and skills engaged in a complex struggle to render his native Caribbean culture: the New World—not Eden but a successor to Eden, a polyglot place, an archipelago determined to survive—a world he calls "a ferment without a history, like heaven...a writer’s heaven."

Derek Walcott is the greatest poet and playwright writing in English that the West Indies has produced. His Collected Poems (1986) is itself a massive achievement, bringing together work from 10 previous books written between 1948 and 1984. It moves from his first privately printed pamphlet, 25 Poems, to his Lowellian sequence, Midsummer. It includes early work from The Castaway and The Gulf, and his major autobiographical poem Another Life (which is his Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man); and later work from Sea Grapes, The Star-Apple Kingdom, and The Fortunate Traveller. Since The Collected Poems, he has published The Arkansas Testament (1987), Omeros (1990), which is a booklength reprise to The Odyssey that parallels Greek and Antillean experience, and The Bounty (1997). The themes of Walcott’s poems are echoed and counterpointed by the ritual action and vernacular language of his major plays, from Dream on Monkey Mountain to Remembrance and Pantomine and on to Beef, No Chicken, The Last Carnival, and A Branch of the Blue Nile. Reading through Walcott’s lifework, one is always aware of the covenant he has made with a people and a place.

Walcott has one of the finest ears of any poet writing in English since Hart Crane or Dylan Thomas. His descriptive powers are, as Joseph Brodsky pointed out, truly epic. He has repeatedly sought to give voice to the inlets and beaches, the hills, promontories, and mountains of his native country. The sea is an inescapable presence in his work and has fundamentally affected his sense of being an islander. ("The sea was my privilege/ and a fresh people," he writes in Omeros.) He exults so much in the salty tang of words themselves that at times it feels as if the vowels and consonants of his three-language vocabulary (English, English patois, and French patois) have been saturated by the sea itself. Each phrase seems "soaked in salt."

Here is the beginning of his early lyric "A Sea-Chantey":

Anguilla, Adina, Antigua, Canelles, Andreuille, all the _l_’s, Voyelles, of the liquid Antilles... There is a quality of earthly prayer in the way Walcott luxuriates in sounds and savors letters, turning over the words, holding up the names. A sacred sense of vocation informs his high eloquence and powerful commitment to articulating his native realm, calling out "the litany of islands,/ The rosary of archipelagoes" and "the amen of calm waters."

Walcott was born in 1930 in Castries, the capital of St. Lucia. He entered the province of poetry empowered by the feeling that he was speaking not just out of his own experience but for everything he saw around him, naming a world thus far undefined:

Forty years gone, in my island childhood, I felt that the gift of poetry had made me one of the chosen, that all experience was kindling to the fire of the Muse. _(Midsummer)_ Walcott’s early Adamic pact with his island was also balanced by a sense of self-division and estrangement. He grew up as a "divided child"—a Methodist in an overwhelmingly Catholic country, a developing artist with a middle-class background and a mixed African, English, and Dutch ancestry coming of age in a mostly black world, a backwater of poverty. Some of the dramatic tension in his work comes from the gap he has always had to cross to describe the people with whom he shares an island. So, too, a great deal of rage sometimes breaks loose in his work as a fury against racism: against those who have typed the poet as neither black nor white enough; against those who still view the Caribbean people as illegitimate and rootless; against the legacies of slavery and colonialism.

Walcott has called himself "a mulatto of style," and increasingly has given voice to the contending languages and cultures operating inside him. The Odyssean figure of Shabine undoubtedly speaks for his creator when he uses the demotic and turns the language of colonial scorn into a source of pride:

I’m just a red nigger who love the sea, I had a sound colonial education, I have Dutch, nigger, and English in me, and either I’m nobody, or I’m a nation. ("The Schooner _Flight_") Homer has become Walcott’s tutelary spirit, and he mimics The Odyssey here by echoing that moment when Odysseus slyly deceives the Cyclops by calling himself "nobody." He is also asserting that this "nobody" is the culture’s representative figure, "a nation." Walcott’s Caribbean reworking of The Odyssey, Omeros, suggests that the task of the Homeric bard is to unearth lost lives and shattered histories, but also to sing of a new people and a new hope.

Walcott is ultimately a poet of affirmations, a writer who believes that the task of art is to transcend history and rename the world. As he says in "The Antilles: Fragments of Epic Memory," "For every poet it is always morning in the world. History a forgotten, insomniac night; History and elemental awe are always our early beginning, because the fate of poetry is to fall in love with the world, in spite of History." The poet’s enterprise is a redemptive one, a joyous calling. Derek Walcott’s lifework is a grand testament to the visionary powers of language and to the freshening wonders of a world that is always starting over again despite History, a world that is always startling and new.

Sea Grapes ----------

That sail which leans on light, tired of islands, a schooner beating up the Caribbean   for home, could be Odysseus, home-bound on the Aegean; that father and husband’s   longing, under gnarled sour grapes, is like the adulterer hearing Nausicaa’s name in every gull’s outcry.   This brings nobody peace. The ancient war between obsession and responsibility will never finish and has been the same   for the sea-wanderer or the one on shore now wriggling on his sandals to walk home, since Troy sighed its last flame,   and the blind giant’s boulder heaved the trough from whose groundswell the great hexameters come to the conclusions of exhausted surf.   The classics can console. But not enough.   The Season of Phantasmal Peace ------------------------------

Then all the nations of birds lifted together the huge net of the shadows of this earth in multitudinous dialects, twittering tongues, stitching and crossing it. They lifted up the shadows of long pines down trackless slopes, the shadows of glass-faced towers down evening streets, the shadow of a frail plant on a city sill— the net rising soundless as night, the birds’ cries soundless, until there was no longer dusk, or season, decline, or weather, only this passage of phantasmal light that not the narrowest shadow dared to sever.   And men could not see, looking up, what the wild geese drew, what the ospreys trailed behind them in silvery ropes that flashed in the icy sunlight; they could not hear battalions of starlings waging peaceful cries, bearing the net higher, covering this world like the vines of an orchard, or a mother drawing the trembling gauze over the trembling eyes of a child fluttering to sleep; it was the light that you will see at evening on the side of a hill in yellow October, and no one hearing knew what change had brought into the raven’s cawing, the killdeer’s screech, the ember-circling chough such an immense, soundless, and high concern for the fields and cities where the birds belong, except it was their seasonal passing, Love, made seasonless, or, from the high privilege of their birth, something brighter than pity for the wingless ones below them who shared dark holes in windows and in houses, and higher they lifted the net with soundless voices above all change, betrayals of falling suns, and this season lasted one moment, like the pause between dusk and darkness, between fury and peace, but, for such as our earth is now, it lasted long.   Poems and excerpts from Collected Poems 1948–1984, by Derek Walcott. Copyright © 1986 by Derek Walcott. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Inc.

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