The Poetry of Derek Walcott 1948-2013
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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
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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