The Poetry of Derek Walcott 1948-2013 Read online

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  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Dedication

  FROM 25 POEMS (1949)

  The Fishermen Rowing Homeward …

  In My Eighteenth Year

  Private Journal

  Letter to a Painter in England

  A City’s Death by Fire

  As John to Patmos

  I with Legs Crossed Along the Daylight Watch

  FROM EPITAPH FOR THE YOUNG: XII CANTOS (1949)

  Canto II

  FROM POEMS (1957)

  The Dormitory

  To Nigel

  Hart Crane

  The Sisters of Saint Joseph

  Kingston—Nocturne

  FROM IN A GREEN NIGHT (1948–60)

  A Far Cry from Africa

  Ruins of a Great House

  Tales of the Islands

  Return to Dennery, Rain

  Pocomania

  Parang

  A Careful Passion

  A Letter from Brooklyn

  Brise Marine

  Anadyomene

  A Sea-Chantey

  In a Green Night

  Islands

  FROM THE CASTAWAY (1965)

  The Castaway

  The Swamp

  A Village Life

  A Tropical Bestiary

  Goats and Monkeys

  Veranda

  Nights in the Gardens of Port of Spain

  God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen

  Crusoe’s Journal

  Crusoe’s Island

  Codicil

  FROM THE GULF (1969)

  The Corn Goddess

  from Metamorphoses: Moon

  Junta

  Mass Man

  Miramar

  Exile

  The Train

  Homage to Edward Thomas

  The Gulf

  Elegy

  Blues

  Air

  Che

  Negatives

  Homecoming: Anse La Raye

  The Cell

  Star

  Love in the Valley

  The Walk

  Hic Jacet

  FROM ANOTHER LIFE (1973)

  From Book I: The Divided Child: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5

  From Book II: Homage to Gregorias: 8

  From Book III: A Simple Flame: 14, 15

  From Book IV: The Estranging Sea: 20, 21, 22, 23

  FROM SEA GRAPES (1976)

  Sea Grapes

  Adam’s Song

  Party Night at the Hilton

  The Lost Federation

  Parades, Parades

  Dread Song

  Names

  Sainte Lucie

  Ohio, Winter

  The Chelsea

  Love After Love

  Dark August

  The Harvest

  Midsummer, Tobago

  To Return to the Trees

  FROM THE STAR-APPLE KINGDOM (1979)

  The Schooner Flight

  The Sea Is History

  Egypt, Tobago

  R.T.S.L.

  Forest of Europe

  Koenig of the River

  The Star-Apple Kingdom

  FROM THE FORTUNATE TRAVELLER (1982)

  Old New England

  North and South

  Map of the New World

  Roman Outposts

  Greece

  The Man Who Loved Islands

  Jean Rhys

  The Spoiler’s Return

  The Hotel Normandie Pool

  Easter

  The Fortunate Traveller

  The Season of Phantasmal Peace

  FROM MIDSUMMER (1984)

  I “The jet bores like a silverfish through volumes of cloud—”

  II “Companion in Rome, whom Rome makes as old as Rome”

  III “At the Queen’s Park Hotel, with its white, high-ceilinged rooms”

  IV “This Spanish port, piratical in diverseness”

  V “The hemispheres lie sweating, flesh to flesh”

  VI “Midsummer stretches beside me with its cat’s yawn”

  VII “Our houses are one step from the gutter. Plastic curtains”

  XIIII “Today I respect structure, the antithesis of conceit”

  XIV “With the frenzy of an old snake shedding its skin”

  XV “I can sense it coming from far, too, Maman, the tide”

  XVI “So what shall we do for the dead, to whose conch-bordered”

  XVII “I pause to hear a racketing triumph of cicadas”

  XIX (Gauguin I and II) “On the quays of Papeete, the dawdling white-ducked colonists”

  XXI “A long, white, summer cloud, like a cleared linen table”

  XXII “Rest, Christ! from tireless war. See, it’s midsummer”

  XXIII “With the stampeding hiss and scurry of green lemmings”

  XXVIII “Something primal in our spine makes the child swing”

  XXIX “Perhaps if I’d nurtured some divine disease”

  XXX “Gold dung and ruinous straw from the horse garages”

  XXXI “Along Cape Cod, salt crannies of white harbors”

  XXXIV “Thalassa! Thalassa! The thud of that echoing blue”

  XXXV “Mud. Clods. The sucking heel of the rain-flinger”

  XXXVI “The oak inns creak in their joints as light declines”

  XXXVIII “Autumn’s music grates. From tuning forks of branches”

  XLI “The camps hold their distance—brown chestnuts and gray smoke”

  XLII “Chicago’s avenues, as white as Poland”

  XLVIII “Raw ochre sea cliffs in the slanting afternoon”

  L “I once gave my daughters, separately, two conch shells”

  LI “Since all of your work was really an effort to appease”

  LII “I heard them marching the leaf-wet roads of my head”

  LIV “The midsummer sea, the hot pitch road, this grass, these shacks that made me”

  FROM THE ARKANSAS TESTAMENT (1987)

  Cul de Sac Valley

  The Three Musicians

  Saint Lucia’s First Communion

  Gros-Ilet

  White Magic

  The Light of the World

  Oceano Nox

  To Norline

  Winter Lamps

  For Adrian

  God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen: Part II

  The Arkansas Testament

  FROM THE BOUNTY (1997)

  The Bounty

  2 Signs

  5 Parang

  6 “It depends on how you look at the cream church on the cliff”

  8 Homecoming

  10 “New creatures ease from earth, nostrils nibbling air”

  16 Spain

  21 Six Fictions

  22 “I am considering a syntax the color of slate”

  23 “I saw stones that shone with stoniness, I saw thorns”

  26 “The sublime always begins with the chord ‘And then I saw’”

  28 “Awakening to gratitude in this generous Eden”

  30 “The sea should have settled him, but its noise is no help”

  31 Italian Eclogues

  32 “She returns to her role as a seagull. The wind”

  34 “At the end of this line there is an opening door”

  37 “After the plague, the city-wall caked with flies, the smoke’s amnesia”

  FR
OM TIEPOLO’S HOUND (2000)

  I “They stroll on Sundays down Donningens Street”

  II “What should be true of the remembered life”

  III “Flattered by any masterful representation”

  XX “Over the years the feast’s details grew fainter”

  XXI “Blessed Mary of the Derelicts. The church in Venice”

  XXII “One dawn I woke up to the gradual terror”

  XXIII “Teaching in St. Thomas, I had never sought it out”

  FROM THE PRODIGAL (2004)

  1 “In autumn, on the train to Pennsylvania”

  2 “Chasms and fissures of the vertiginous Alps”

  3 “Blessed are the small farms conjugating Horace”

  4 “O Genoan, I come as the last line of where you began”

  9 “I lay on the bed near the balcony in Guadalajara”

  11 “The dialect of the scrub in the dry season”

  12 “Prodigal, what were your wanderings about?”

  18 “Grass, bleached to straw on the precipices of Les Cayes”

  FROM WHITE EGRETS (2010)

  1 “The chessmen are as rigid on their chessboard”

  2 “Your two cats squat, heraldic sphinxes, with such”

  3 “This was my early war, the bellowing quarrels”

  4 White Egrets

  5 The Acacia Trees

  6 “August, the quarter-moon dangles like a bugle”

  7 “It’s what others do, not us, die, even the closest”

  8 Sicilian Suite

  10 In Italy

  12 The Lost Empire

  13 The Specter of Empire

  14 Pastoral

  15 A London Afternoon

  21 A Sea-Change

  23 “What? You’re going to be Superman at seventy-seven?”

  24 “The sorrel rump of a mare in the bush”

  27 Sixty Years After

  30 “All day I wish I was at Case-en-Bas”

  32 “Be happy now at Cap, for the simplest joys—”

  33 In Amsterdam

  39 “For the crackle and hiss of the word ‘August’”

  43 Forty Acres

  44 “‘So the world is waiting for Obama,’ my barber said”

  45 “In the leathery closeness of the car through canefields”

  46 “Here’s what that bastard calls ‘the emptiness’—”

  47 Epithalamium: The Rainy Season

  50 Barcelona

  52 Elegy

  54 “This page is a cloud between whose fraying edges”

  Index of Titles and First Lines

  Also by Derek Walcott

  Copyright

  Owing to limitations of space, the epic poem Omeros (1990) has not been included in this collection, but it is available from FSG (ISBN: 978-0-374-52350-3).

  To Elizabeth, Anna, and Peter

  FROM

  25 Poems

  (1949)

  THE FISHERMEN ROWING HOMEWARD …

  The fishermen rowing homeward in the dusk,

  Do not consider the stillness through which they move.

  So I since feelings drown, should no more ask

  What twilight and safety your strong hands gave.

  And the night, urger of the old lies

  Winked at by stars that sentry the humped hills,

  Should hear no words of faring forth, for time knows

  That bitter and sly sea, and love raises walls.

  Yet others, who now watch my progress outward

  To a sea which is crueler than any word

  Of love, may see in me the calm my voyage makes,

  Parting new water in the antique hoax.

  And the secure from thinking may climb safe to liners,

  Hearing small rumors of paddlers drowned near stars.

  IN MY EIGHTEENTH YEAR

  for Warwick Walcott

  Having measured the years today by the calendar

  That tells your seventeenth death, I stayed until

  It was the honest time to remember

  How the house has lived with and without you well.

  And I do not chide death’s hand,

  Nor can I hurl death taunts or tantrums

  Because the washing faiths my father walked are no more light,

  And all the gulls that were tall as his dreams

  Are one with his light rotting in the sand.

  Nor can I hurl taunts or tantrums.

  Or blast with syllables the yellow grave

  Under the crooked tree where all Lazarus is history.

  But greater than most is death’s gift, that can

  Behind the bright dust that was the skeleton,

  (Who drank the wine and believed the blessed bread)

  Can make us see the forgotten price of man

  Shine from the perverse beauty of the dead.

  PRIVATE JOURNAL

  We started from places that saw no gay carracks wrecked

  And where our green solitudes did not look deciduous;

  And afternoons after schools, well our aunt Sorrow came,

  Disciplined, erect,

  To teach us writing. Outside boyhoods chased their leather

  Football along the level glare of playing fields, and

  Sweated and cursed amiably, while we sat, with slow tears

  Shaping the heart’s weather.

  It is too early or too late, to ask if we were gifted

  With this pain that saw all, yet was no man’s remedy,

  Blessed or cursed with vision that saw growth’s long confusion

  That time has not lifted?

  We learned to hate from too much rumor, friends and masters,

  The bully who jeered because we could not swim at nine,

  And the blond child, the one with too much money; then liked

  These eccentric wasters

  Of time, who could not see like us their deep affliction;

  Of whom we envy now industrious idleness, their

  Ability to forget or postpone death as an

  Inevitable fiction.

  And love came, cracked the hearts it joined just as love ought,

  Was our tallest delight and our deepest affliction,

  Taught us more than philosophy did that we wanted

  Freedom from, not of, thought.

  LETTER TO A PAINTER IN ENGLAND

  Where you rot under the strict gray industry

  Of cities of fog and winter fevers, I

  Send this to remind you of personal islands

  For which Gauguins sicken, and to explain

  How I have grown to know your passionate

  Talent and this wild love of landscape.

  It is April and already no doubt for you

  As the journals report, the prologues of spring

  Appear behind the rails of city parks,

  Or the late springtime must be publishing

  Pink apologies along the black wet branch

  To men in overcoats, who will conceal

  The lines of songs leaping behind their pipes.

  And you must find it difficult to imagine

  This April as a season where the tide burns

  Black; leaves crack into ashes from the drought;

  A dull red burning like heart’s desolation.

  The roads are white with dust and the leaves

  Of the trees have a nervous spinsterish quiet.

  And walking under the trees today I saw

  The canoes that are marked with comic names

  Daylight, St. Mary Magdalene, Gay Girl.

  Made me think of your chief scenes for painting

  And days of instruction at the soft villa

  When we watched your serious experience, learning.

  And you must understand how I am lost

  To see my gifts rotting under this season

  You who defined with an imperious palette

  The several postures of this virginal island

  You understand how I am lost to have
/>
  Your brush’s zeal and not to be explicit.

  But the grace we avoid, that gave us vision,

  Discloses around curves an architecture whose

  Sunday logic we can take or refuse,

  And leaves to the simple soul its own decision

  After landscapes, palms, cathedrals or the hermit-thrush

  And wins my love now and gives it a silence

  That would inform the blind world of its flesh.

  A CITY’S DEATH BY FIRE

  After that hot gospeler had leveled all but the churched sky,

  I wrote the tale by tallow of a city’s death by fire.

  Under a candle’s eye that smoked in tears, I

  Wanted to tell in more than wax of faiths that were snapped like wire.

  All day I walked abroad among the rubbled tales,

  Shocked at each wall that stood on the street like a liar,

  Loud was the bird-rocked sky, and all the clouds were bales

  Torn open by looting and white in spite of the fire;

  By the smoking sea, where Christ walked, I asked why

  Should a man wax tears when his wooden world fails.

  In town leaves were paper, but the hills were a flock of faiths

  To a boy who walked all day, each leaf was a green breath

  Rebuilding a love I thought was dead as nails,

  Blessing the death and the baptism by fire.

  AS JOHN TO PATMOS

  As John to Patmos, among the rocks and the blue live air, hounded

  His heart to peace, as here surrounded

  By the strewn silver on waves, the wood’s crude hair, the rounded

  Breasts of the milky bays, palms, flocks, and the green and dead

  Leaves, the sun’s brass coin on my cheek, where

  Canoes brace the sun’s strength, as John in that bleak air,

  So am I welcomed richer by these blue scapes Greek there,

  So I will voyage no more from home, may I speak here.

  This island is heaven away from the dustblown blood of cities,

  See the curve of bay, watch the straggling flower, pretty is

  The winged sound of trees, the sparse powdered sky when lit is

  The night. For beauty has surrounded

  These black children, and freed them of homeless ditties.

  As John to Patmos, among each love-leaping air,

  O slave, soldier, worker under red trees sleeping, hear

  What I swear now, as John did,

  To praise lovelong the living and the brown dead.

  I WITH LEGS CROSSED ALONG THE DAYLIGHT WATCH

  I with legs crossed along the daylight watch