Derek Walcott is eighty four years old, and for most of his years he has been composing perfect poems in a voice that seemed to emerge fully throated, yet has always expanded in knowledge of craft, history and wisdom. He won the Nobel Prize in 1992, and unlike some laureates, he was not only worthy of the honor, he continued to write volumes that brought his usual tools to bear. He has been a constant traveler, from his native Saint Lucia to much of the United States, England, Wales and the rest of the world. When he gets as specific as all poets must, he brings the reader into his location with crystalline precision that makes one ache to be exactly where the poem resides.
Here are some lines from the title poem in The Star Apple Kingdom, a volume published in 1979 :
There were still shards of ancient pastoral
in those shires of the island where the cattle drank
their pools of shadows from an older sky,
surviving from when the landscape copies such subjects as
“Herefords at Sunset in the Valley of the Wye.’’
The mountain water that fell white from the mill wheel
sprinkling like petals from the star-apple trees,
and all of the sugar mills moved by mules
on the treadmill of Monday to Monday, would repeat
in tongues of water and wind and fire, in tongues
of Mission School pickaninnies, like rivers remembering
their source, Parish Trelawney, Parish St. David, Parish
St Andrew, the names afflicting the pastures ,
the lime groves and fences of marl stone and the cattle
with a docile longing, an epochal content.
And there were, like old wedding lace in an attic,
among the boas and parasols and the tea-colored
daguerreotypes, hints of an epochal happiness
as ordered and infinite to the child
as the great house road to the Great House.
Like many Walcott poems, it is unhurried and rarely stops noting–directly and indirectly–the complexities of history, geography, and the ethos of empire grasped by a dark-skinned man born in a colony. None of the above will ever be expressed with stridency or cant, and none of the above will detract from the necessities of composition.
“What was the Caribbean?” he asks later in the same poem. It is a question that cannot be fully answered, yet Walcott, with his stately, painterly music, (his father was an artist) helps us get closer to understanding not just that part of the world, but, of course, the wider world to which it, he, and all of us connect.
Glyn Maxwell, an accomplished poet and thoughtful editor, selected the poems in The Poetry of Derek Walcott, and chose not to write an introduction. So it is a mystery that he did not include a sampling from Omeros, published in 1990, the kind of classic Joseph Conrad might have admired:
I was both there and not there.
I was attending the funeral of a character I’d created :
the fiction of her life needed a good ending.
Revisiting Omeros makes the exclusion painful. But the verse here is so outstanding that it insists on acknowledgement of power in the most benign understanding of the word. Walcott had to have been born with acute vision, and that vision has been fed by a restless learnedness that is never pompous or ponderous. Lines from “Parang” make my point, as does every page in this book:
It depends on how you look at the cream church on the cliff
with its rusted roof and a stunted bell tower in the garden
off the road edged with white hard lilies. It could seem sad if
you were from another country, and your doubt did not harden
into pity for the priest in boots and muddy clothes who comes
from a county in Ireland you can’t remember, where you felt
perhaps the same sadness for a stone chapel and low walls
heavy with time, an iron sea, and the history of the Celt
told as a savagery of bagpipes and drums.
Turn into this Catholic station, a peaked, brown vestry
and a bleating lamb in the grass. So the visitor believes
the wounded trunk in the shade of large almond leaves.
On a Saturday, shut, and a temperate sky, Blanchisseuse
closed and an elsewhere-remembering sea,
you, too, could succumb to a helpless shrug that says,
“God! The sad magic that is the hope of black people .
All their drumming and dancing, the ceremonies, the chants.
The chantwell screeching like a brass cock on a steeple.
The intricate, unlit labyrinth of their ignorance.”
But I feel the love in his veined, mottled hands,
his lilt that lengthens the road and makes in Ireland’s.
Hayden Carruth, open about his lack of belief in God, connected poetry to prayer, and that can be said of much of Walcott’s poetry. It is prayer rarely of beseeching, but of delineating types of webbing and threads that make engagement with literature and the planet a worthwhile task. With age Walcott has come to a firmer recognition of this, as in recent lines from an untitled piece in White Egrets:
Be happy now at Cap, for the simplest joys—
For a line of white egrets prompting the last word,
for the sea’s recitation re-entering my head
with questions it erases, cancelling the demonic voice
by which I have recently been possessed; unheard
it whispers the way the fiend does to a madman
who gibbers to his bloody hands that he was seized
the way the sea swivels in the conch’s ear, like the roar
of applause that precedes the actor with increased
doubt to the pitch of the paralyzed horror that his prime is past.
Derek Walcott’s prime has been fruitful and long. May it continue.
