Derek Walcott
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DEREK WALCOTT
• Derek Walcott is a Caribbean poet who was born in 1930 in Castries on the island of St. Lucia, one of the Windward Islands in the Lesser Antilles.
• Both his grandmothers were said to have been the descendants of slaves.
• He was born into a Methodist, English-speaking family although the dominant tradition on the island was Catholic and French speaking.
• His father, described in the poem “A Letter from Brooklyn”, was a civil servant and painter who died at the age of 34 when Derek was only one year old.
• He began writing poems at the age of fourteen and plays at the age of sixteen.
• After studying at St. Mary's College, an English-speaking private school eventually run by the Irish Presentation Brothers, in St. Lucia and at the University of the West Indies in Jamaica where he graduated with an Arts Degree in English, French and Latin, he moved in 1953 to Trinidad, where he worked as a theatre and art critic.
• In 1954 he married Faye Moyston. They seperated in 1956 and divorced the following year.
• He founded the Trinidad Theatre Workshop in 1959, which has produced his plays (and others) since that time, and he remains active with its Board of Directors.
• At the age of 18, he made his debut with his first collection 25 Poems in 1948, but his breakthrough came with the collection of poems, In a Green Night, in 1962. That same year he married his second wife, Margeret Maillard.
• In the 1960’s his Selected Poems was a publishing success and he was awarded a substantial grant by the Rockefeller Foundation.
• In 1970 his best known play, Dream on Monkey Mountain, was published and later performed with great success in New York.
• He has learned his poetic craft from the European tradition, but he remains mindful of West Indian landscapes and experiences.
• In 1973 he published Another Life, a long narrative book-length poem, offering autobiographical details and opinions.
• In 1976 he published a collection Sea Grapes (including the poem “Endings”) which dealt with changing phases – beginnings and endings - of his life.
• After a break with the Trinidad Theatre workshop in 1976, Walcott directed his attention increasingly to the United States, where he has held a number of teaching positions, including a long-standing appointment at Boston University.
• In 1979 Saint Lucia achieved independence following the collapse of the West Indian Federation.
• In 1979 he published The Star-Apple Kingdom, a very successful collection containing the long poem, “The Schooner Flight”.
• He founded the Boston’s Playwright’s Theatre at Boston University in 1981 hoping to create a home for new plays in Boston. That same year he was granted an award by the American MacArthur Foundation worth over $250,000.
• In 1982 he published a collection of poems called The Fortunate Traveller and, that same year, married Norlene Metivier, his third wife.
• In 1986 his Collected Poems were published and sold remarkably well.
• His 1988 collection of poems, The Arkansas Testament, written about his life in Saint Lucia, (dealt with in part one entitled “Here”) and his life in America (dealt with in part two entitled “Elsewhere”) contained the following poems: “To Norline”, “Saint Lucia’s First Communion”, “The Young Wife”, and “Summer Elegies”.
• In 1989 he was awarded the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry, the first non-English writer to be granted the award.
• Omeros (modern Greek for Homer) was published in 1990, just after his sixtieth birthday, and is Walcott’s most ambitious work to date, a book-length poem that places his beloved West Indies in the role of the ancient bard’s Cyclades. Gods and heroic warriors do not inhabit this retelling of the Odyssey, but simple Caribbean fishermen, whose Greek names register their hybrid identities.
• In 1992 he became the first Caribbean writer to win the Nobel Prize for Literature.
• With his artistic and financial success he bought a house on Saint Lucia and spent more and more of his time on the island.
• In 1997 he brought out a new collection, The Bounty, which dealt with themes sense of old age and death.
• In 1998 he co-wrote a Broadway musical, The Capeman, with the singer/songwriter Paul Simon. Unfortunately it proved to be the biggest flop in the history of Broadway musicals closing with losses of $11 million.
• In 2000 he published the long poem Tiepolo’s Hound, a biographical study of the Impressionist painter Camille Pisarro.
• That same year his twin brother, Roderick, died.
• In 2004, at the age of 74, The Prodigal, his sixteenth book of poetry was published. • He now divides his time between his home in the Caribbean and New York City.
POEMS – A BRIEF THEMATIC GUIDE
A Letter from Brooklyn • The poem deals with the influences that were important in Walcott’s life and career as an artist. • Religion, particularly the methodist religion, was an important part of his father’s life and has also influenced his own poetry in both substance and style. • The artistic example of his father is celebrated in this poem. • The belief that poetry is a divine gift is exemplified in the story of his father’s life and death
Endings • This is a short one-sentence poem on the theme of transience. • The poem offers examples of things that fade and end. • Even love is seen as transient. • The idea of Beethoven’s hearing ending offers a deeper meaning and a deeper image.
. To Norline • This is a brief meditation on lost love and the power of memory. • The poem also considers the evocative and memorable power of poetry. • The theme of the sea and its fluctuating status is important in Derek Walcott’s poetry.
Summer Elegies
• This is a sensuous celebration of sexual love and a lament for its loss.
• The poem attempts to recapture a moment that is seen as parasitical.
• Love and the paradise of love is not sustainable.
• There is a Biblical theme of loss and the fall introduced at the last moment.
The Young Wife
• This is a poem written to comfort a husband who has lost his wife.
• The poem explores the complex processes of grief, including guilt, despair and comfort.
• There is a contrast evident between how grief affects a husband and how grief affects their children.
• The poem concludes by asserting the primacy of love over death.
Saint Lucia’s First Communion • The poem describes one of the most important religious festivals on the island of Saint Lucia. • At first the poem describes the communicants. • It sees the religious ceremony as akin to a form of slavery. • The poet wishes to liberate the children to find their own way to heaven.
THEMES
Religion
• Derek Walcott was brought up in the Methodist religion.
• His father’s religious faith and the influence that had on both his father’s life and on his own life is dealt with in the poem A Letter from Brooklyn. In that poem the simple faith of the old lady restores the poet’s faith in God.
• He offers a critical perspective on the traditional religious practices of Catholicism in Saint Lucia’s First Communion where he sees the children as innocent victims of an institutionalised religion. But the poem does have a positive religious perspective as he imagines the children flying heavenward beyond prejudice and evil.
• There is a complex religious sentiment evident in For Adrian where the dead child comforts those without faith in an afterlife. The poem posits a wisdom beyond death but one aligned to the wonders of the natural world.
• Pentecost has not only a religious title but also a religious conclusion as it celebrates the sense of a soul finding itself in a natural sea-side environment away from the soulless city.
• Even the poem Summer Elegies, which is ostensibly about erotic love, ends with a Biblical sense of guilt and sin.
Love and the End of Love
• Derek Walcott was married three times and many of his poems deal with themes of love.
• That love has a powerful but temporal influence on human life is acknowledged in Endings where love’s “lightening flash” has no “thunderous end.”
• The dissolution of his marriage to his third wife, Norline Metivier, is treated with metaphoric brilliance in To Norline, a poem that charts the end of a relationship.
• Death can also end a relationship but in The Young Wife Walcott explores the manner in which love can overcome death and the ending of life.
• Summer Elegies explores the excitement and intensity of love but also acknowledges the guilt and emptiness that come with the end of a relationship.
Death
• Derek Walcott’s father died when the poet was only one year old but his death had a profound effect on his poetry. This is explored in A Letter from Brooklyn. • The devastation caused by the death of a child, particularly to his grieving family, is explored in the unusual monolgue from beyond the grave which makes up most of For Adrian. But the attitude to death is ultimately positive.
• That positive view is also expressed in another poem on death and grief, The Young Wife, where a sense of hope evolves out of the devastation of grief.
The Caribbean and the Colonial Experience
• Derek Walcott was born on the island of Saint Lucia in 1930 when it was an English colony and this colonial experience has had an influence on his poetry.
• Both his grandmothers were said to have been the descendants of slaves. The experience of slavery is a subject the poetry explores.
• The manner in which colonisers control their subjects through the use of language is explored in The Sailor Sings Back to the Casuarinas. The politics of naming and language is addressed in the manner in which a tree is named. Singing back to the trees is a way of reclaiming them from the colonial masters.
• Derek Walcott has often felt a conflict in his poetry between his black skin and his white language.
• The disruptive legacy of the slave trade is explored in the extract from Omeros. The central character, Achille, is a descendant of slaves who were brought from Africa to the Caribbean. There is a contrast between his poverty-stricken situation as a fisherman and his tribal and regal ancestry in Africa.
• The search for a sense of identity in the midst of a colonial legacy is also explored in the extract from Omeros where the central character, Achille, seeks his ancestor, the tribal figure of Afolabe.
• The contrast between the standard English of the poem’s narrative and the Creole English of the character’s dialogue is a further manifestation of the complex colonial legacy.
STYLE
• Derek Walcott uses a variety of poetic forms in the poems on the course.
• There is a loose, relaxed narrative form, using dialogue and description, in the poem A Letter from Brooklyn and also in the lengthy one stanza extract from “The Schooner Flight” entitled The Sailor Sings Back to the Casuarinas.
• That use of dialogue and description is also evident in the extract from Omeros but this poem is also written in the long hexameter line associated with the epics of Homer and in the three line stanza form associated with the epic poems of Dante.
• There is a complex use of couplets in two poems – Endings and For Adrian. In neither poem are the couplets traditional rhyming couplets. In the brief poem Endings the couplets are short, pithy and, like “the silence that surrounds Beethoven’s head”, embued with a sense of power and mystery. In For Adrian the couplets are equally powerful but more expansive.
• The most common form evident in these poems is the four-line quatrain, influenced to some extent in the Methodist hymns Walcott learned in his childhood. The themes, as well as the form, often reflect a religious content, perhaps not in To Norline, but certainly in Saint Lucia’s First Communion, Pentecost, The Young Wife and Summer Elegies.
Language
• Derek Walcott was born into an English speaking family in the predominantly French-speaking island of Saint Lucia. His use of English belongs to the English poetic tradition but it is also influenced by the religious language of his Methodist up-bringing and also by the traditional patois of Creole English. • He has a very fine ear for dialogue as is evident in the manner in which he captures the old-fashioned religious language of the elderly correspondent in A Letter from Brooklyn.
• That ear for dialogue is also evident in the extract from Omeros where the Caribbean dialogue of the mate and Achille is brilliantly rendered. Walcott shows here how poetry can be made of the colloquial language of his homeland. That sense of a distinctive Caribbean language is also evident in The Sailor Sings Back to the Casuarinas which is aware of “the pain of history words contain.”
• For Adrian also uses a form of dialogue where the poet enters the mind, the soul or, more subtly, the voice of a young child wise beyond his years.
• There is an astute religious sensibility present in many of the poems. Pentecost uses religious terminolgy as does Saint Lucia’s First Communion while the Biblical language which concludes Summer Elegies offers an original perspective on the love affair being described.
• While many of the poems are clear and comprehensible there is a sense of mystery in some encoraged by the use of a cryptic, allusive and somewhat private language as in For Adrian and also in some of the references in Summer Elegies.
• The poetic sensibility of this modern poet is revealed in his constant and varied use of metaphor and simile (see below).
Metaphor and Simile
• From the beginning Derek Walcott has used both metaphor and simile with great inventiveness and originality.
• The metaphor of a spider’s web runs throughout A Letter from Brooklyn and helps to unify the different strands of this complex, sensitive treatment of old age, art and death.
• In Endings the “silence that surrounds Beethoven’s head” becomes a metaphor for the mysterious of endings and beginnings while the poem is bolstered by the clever use of similes.
• Simile is also used repeatedly in The Sailor Sings Back to the Casuarinas where the trees are a constant source of comparison.
• To Norline, although very brief, has a subtle mixture of metaphor (in the opening stanza where the wave’s surf is seen as a sponge erasing lines and love) and simile in the second stanza (where the poet’s memory of his sleeping beside his wife is compared to a coffee mug warming his palm) and in the third stanza (where the sight of a salt-sipping tern is compared to a memorable line of poetry.)
• At times the use of metaphor and simile is complicated and, perhaps, over-complicated. In Summer Elegies, for example, the technical terms (frisket, excelsior) offer a tenuous link to that with which they are being compared and the metaphor of the snake, while Biblical in origin, is not clearly developed.
• At other times the use of metaphor and simile reveals a wonderfully visual imagination as in Saint Lucia’s First Communion where a caterpillar is compared to an accordian and communion girl’s compared to candles.
• Similes accumulate in the extract from Omeros where the sleeping Achille is compared to both a foetus and a sea-horse and the eye of a dead albacore compared to the moon. There is also a clever metaphor concluding the poem where cumulus clouds in the heavenly sky are compared to the gates of an ancient city
The Sound of Poetry – Rhyme, Assonance and Alliteration
• Although Derek Walcott uses a variety of poetic forms in the poems on the course, his use of rhyme is more subtle than regular, more attuned to the off-beat sounds of the Caribbean than to any formal pattern.
• An early poem like A Letter from Brooklyn uses rhyme more regularly than is evident in the latter poems. There are many rhyming couplets in this narrative poem and it ends with a distinctive rhyme in the concluding couplet: believe/grieve. A latter poem For Adrian also uses couplets but not one of these couplets rhymes. A recent poem, the extract from Omeros, borrows the triplet form from Dante but uses the ABA BCB ryhme scheme very occasionally and always in a manner that subservient to the flow of the narrative.
• Another poem using couplets, this time very short-lined couplets, is Endings. In this poem, although none of the couplets rhyme, there are subtle echoes throughout the poem involving off-rhymes ( flesh/flash, sand/end/sound) assonance (fail/fade) and alliteration (fades from the flesh, flowers fading like the flesh, sweating pumice stone, silence that surrounds).
• Five of the poems are written in quatrains but none of these employ regular rhyme schemes. To Norline is the closest to an ABAB rhyme scheme with its half-rhymes and assonantal echoes. The rhymes are purposely faint: dawns/sponge, come/palm, house/yours, tern/turn. This poem also uses alliteration cleverly, particularly on the “s” sounds to convey the sound of the surf on the beach: slate, surf, sponge, someone, still-sleeping, salt-sipping and some.
• The rhyming scheme in Saint Lucia’s First Communion varies from a loose ABAB in most stanzas to AABB in the third stanza and ABBA in the fourth stanza. There are assonantal patterns throughout the poem (cotton frock, cotton stockings, pink ribboned missals, caterpillars accordion).
• Pentecost uses rhyme more regularly than in any of the other quatrain poems: concrete/street, show/snow, roof/proof, shoal/soul. As in many of the other poems, the use of alliteration, particularly on the “s” sounds, is very evocative: slow scriptures of sand/that sends, not quite a seraph.
• For comments on the rhyme schemes and sound patterns in both The Young Wife and Summer Elegies, see the “Points to Ponder” section on the individual pages devoted to each poem.
Contrast • Many of the poems use a form of contrast to emphasise their thematic concerns.
• Pentecost comes from a book, The Arkansa Testament, which is divided into two contrasting sections entitled “Here” and “Elsewhere”. The poem contrasts the soulless, winter, lost city where he works with “the slow scriptures of sand” he finds in his warm Caribbean home.
• Another form of contrast is evident in Summer Elegies and summed up in the two lines: “All the beach chairs are full/but the beach is emptier.” The poem contrasts the passionate and intense excitement of love with the sense of guilt that accompanies the loss of that excitement.
• There is a stark contrast between the dead and the living in two poems, The Young Wife and For Adrian. In The Young Wife the contrast is overcome by the sense of love that accompanies the end of the poem. In For Adrian the contrast is more mysterious as the realm of the dead child tries to communicate with the living relatives who are grieving his loss.
• The contrast between the formality of standardised English and the local patois or idiom of the Caribbean is explored in the process of naming explored in both The Sailor Sings Back to the Casuarinas and the extract from Omeros.
Comments
Derek Walcott on Derek Walcott “There is a continual sense of motion in the Caribbean – caused by the sea and a feeling that one is always travelling through water and not stationary.”
“My calling as a poet is votive, sacred... it was a cherished vow taken in my young dead father’s name, and my life is to honour that vow.”
“Throughout my whole youth, that was happening. It was the experience of a whole race renaming something that had been named by someone else and giving that object its own metaphoric power.”
“I had a sound colonial education I have Dutch, nigger, and English in me, And either I am nobody, or I am a nation.”
“I come fom a backward place: your duty is supplied by life around you. One guy plants bananas; another plants cocoa; I’m a writer, I plant lines. There’s the same clarity of occupation, and the sense of devotion.”
“I think of myself as a carpenter, as one making frames, simply and well. I’m working a lot in quatrains... and I feel there is something in that that is very ordinary... I find myself wanting to write very simply cut, very contracted, very speakable and very challenging quatrains in rhyme.”
“Well, when I write this poem, each phrase go be soaked in salt; I go draw and knot every line as tight as ropes in this rigging; in simple speech my common language go be the wind...”
“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.” “This island is heaven.”
“Visual surprise is natural in the Caribbean; it comes with the landscape, and faced with its beauty, the sigh of History dissolves.”
“It takes a West Indian a long time to say who he is”
“People who praised classical Greek, if they were there then, would consider the Greek’s tastes vulgar, lurid....All the purple and gold – that’s what I’m saying is very Caribbean, that same vigour and elation of an earlier Greece.”
“The easiest thing to do about colonialism is to refer to history in terms of guilt or punishment or revenge, or whatever. Whereas the rare thingis the resolution of being where one is and doing something positive about taht reality.”
“The romanticised, pastoral vision of Africa that many black people hold can be an escape from the reality around us. In the West Indies, where all the races live and work together, we have the beginnings of a great and unique society. The problem is to recognise our African origins but not to romanticise them.”
Critical Comments on Derek Walcott
“What moves me in Walcott is his refusal of simplifications.” Paul Breslin
“It was the Metaphysicals technique of using metaphor as the prime vehicle of shape and meaning in their poetry that sems to have so greatly impressed Walcott, who has always …”moved in mataphor as in his natural element.” Stewart Brown
“Walcott is a model of ripened ambivalence that makes impossible demands of the heart, tears it to pieces by a contradiction of origins, and finally offers it to the dubious consolation of despair.” George Lamming
“Naming is central to Walcott’s claims for an ‘Adamic’ New World poetics. The act of naming takes the natural world into the cultural domain while grounding language in the domain of the natural. And the choice of a name reveals much about the consciousness of the namer, the degree to which it has become Adamic by exorcising ‘the pain of history words contain.’ ” Paul Breslin
“Omeros attempted to shrink the Iliad and the Odyssey into the tiny sins and squabbles of some Caribbean fishermen and bewildered colonials” William Logan
