DEREK WALCOTT'S POETRY

Author: By Robert Taylor, Special to the Globe

Date: Friday, October 9, 1992
Page: 85
Section: LIVING

Coming of age on the Windward island of St. Lucia, then a British dependency, Walcott heard and absorbed a Creole patois all around him. He learned English in school almost as a foreign tongue. "Perhaps that makes us value English the more," he once said. Those influences, the Caribbean and the sonorous literary traditions of English, fuse in his art. The rhythms of island speech and the sea are tempered by the lords of language -- the Elizabethans, Virgil and Horace, and other classical bards, cavalier and roundhead poets -- Walcott read during childhood. That background preserved his poetry from the perils of the folkloric and insular, even as it retained the pungency of spoken, living words.

His themes as a poet have been remarkably consistent, almost from the start. Walcott's fledgling play as a college undergraduate in Jamaica dealt with Henri-Christophe, the freed slave who helped Toussaint L'Ouverture liberate Haiti from the French rule, but who then became a despot. The islander haunted by the colonial past and his ambivalent feelings about the island's present is a constant in Walcott's volumes. A wanderer, he seeks the meaning of home, a place where he might heal the divisions of his society and
himself.

Earlier poets such as Edward Braithwaite had tried to capture Creole dialect in prose, and had not succeeded. Walcott's first widely recognized collection, "In a Green Night" (1962) was a landmark in Caribbean letters. To employ Walcott's own phrase, it was "like entering a Renoir," and the reviewer P. N. Furbank described the poems as "full of summery melancholy, fresh and stinging colors, luscious melody, and intense awareness of place."

Walcott's poetry, directed at a broad world readership, is cosmopolitan, but his theater pieces, written in mixtures of Creole and English, are in general intended for Caribbean audiences who have had scant experience of live drama. "O Babylon!," for example, is in a modified Rastafarian dialect. The search for an authentic West Indian identity remains at the forefront of Walcott's work. It is present even when he composes a 325-page poem called ''Omeros," after the epics of Homer, for in that poem the greatest character is neither Achilles nor Hector but the Caribbean Sea itself.

In Walcott's poetry one can hear Keats, Robert Lowell, Eliot and others, yet he never seems derivative. Essentially he's a lyric poet who uses language with a keen individual sense of its visual potential. Among his other talents, he's a painter, who even as a boy did landscapes of St. Lucia.

The beach

is plagued with flies, at the lime edge

of channel, their black hymn

drones in the ear. The broken paths debouch

onto a broken pier. Before the church

there is a hedge of altar lace,

a foam-flecked garden whose barefooted path

circles the gabled presbytery

towards a kind of meadow, where a cemetery

rings with the sea.

The sinuous enjambment here duplicates the circling of the path. But Walcott is not only intensely visual; like Frank O'Hara he is often relaxed and playful, blending high diction and the vernacular in unexpected ways.

Today is Thursday, Vallejo is dying

but come girl, get your raincoat, let's look for life

in some cafe behind tear-streaked windows.

Critics frequently judged Walcott's earlier poems "mellifluous"; his well-made, carefully crafted lines and sophisticated allusions had too fine a texture for a popular style that was increasingly gritty and polemic. The title poem of "The Gulf" (1970), however, a meditation on racial violence, signified the appearance of a tougher, less stately diction. Nevertheless, Walcott retained his sense of the complexity of his themes: "The romanticized, 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 recognize our African origins but not to romanticize them."

In his autobiographical book-length poem, "Another Life" (1973), Walcott looked back on his childhood and his enchanted discovery of art. Ancient Troy became the street outside his door; the local grocer

is mantled like a cleric

in a soutane of onion smells, saltfish and garlic,

salt-flaked Newfoundland cod hacked by a cleaver

on a scarred counter where a bent halfpenny

shows Edward VII, Defender of the Faith, Emperor of India . . .

Imagination transforms the boy's world, and the poem records the development of an exceptionally rich inner life. All the same, the first section bears the title "The Divided Child," while another segment is called ''The Estranging Sea." The poet's divisions express his racial and cultural dilemmas, torn between "the stuffed dark nightingale of Keats" and ''the virginal unpainted world." Walcott's internal exile and the role of the wanderer, so integral to his art and subject to all the frictions of race and politics, will not cease with the award of the Nobel Prize; but as another Nobel laureate, Joseph Brodsky, has said about the West Indies, they were ''discovered by Columbus, colonized by the British, and immortalized by Walcott."

an emptiness

as in Balthus,

cobbled alleys,

sunlit, aureate,

a wall, a brown tower

at the end of a street,

a blue without bells,

like a dead canvas

set in its white

frame, and flowers:

gladioli, lame

gladioli, stone petals

in a vase. The choir's

sky-high praise

turned off. A book

of prints that turns

by itself. The ticktock

of high heels on a sidewalk.

A crawling clock.

A craving for work.

From "The Arkansas Testament"

(Farrar Straus & Giroux)

At the rain's edge, a sail.

Slowly the sail will lose sight of islands;

into a mist will go the belief in harbours

of an entire race.

The ten-years war is finished.

Helen's hair, a grey cloud.

Troy, a white ashpit

by the drizzling sea.

The drizzle tightens like the strings of a harp.

A man with clouded eyes picks up the rain

and plucks the first line of the Odyssey.

From "Collected Poems, 1948-1984"

(Farrar Straus & Giroux)

loosens a little, and I gasp

brightness; but it tightens

again. When have I ever not loved

the pain of love? But this has moved

past love to mania. This has the strong

clench of the madman, this is gripping the ledge of

unreason before

plunging howling into the abyss.

Hold hard then, heart.

This way at least you live.

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