Derek Walcott, Poet and Nobel Laureate of the Caribbean, Dies at 87

[JHan]

Source: The New York Times

Derek Walcott, whose intricately metaphorical poetry captured the physical beauty of the Caribbean, the harsh legacy of colonialism and the complexities of living and writing in two cultural worlds, bringing him a Nobel Prize in Literature, died early Friday morning at his home near Gros Islet in St. Lucia. He was 87.

*snip*

With the publication of the collection “In a Green Night” in 1962, critics and poets, Robert Lowell among them, leapt to recognize a powerful new voice in Caribbean literature and to praise the sheer musicality of Mr. Walcott’s verse, the immediacy of its visual images, its profound sense of place.

He had first attracted attention on St. Lucia with a book of poems that he published himself as a teenager. Early on, he showed a remarkable ear for the music of English — heard in the poets whose work he absorbed in his Anglocentric education and on the lips of his fellow St. Lucians — and a painter’s eye for the particulars of the local landscape: its beaches and clouds; its turtles, crabs and tropical fish; the sparkling expanse of the Caribbean.

In the poem “Islands,” from the collection “In a Green Night,” he wrote:

I seek,

As climate seeks its style, to write

Verse crisp as sand, clear as sunlight,

Cold as the curled wave, ordinary

As a tumbler of island water.

He told The Economist in 1990: “The sea is always present. It’s always visible. All the roads lead to it. I consider the sound of the sea to be part of my body. And if you say in patois, ‘The boats are coming back,’ the beat of that line, its metrical space, has to do with the sound and rhythm of the sea itself.”

Read more: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/17/books/derek-walcott-dead-nobel-prize-literature.html

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Gutted to learn of his passing.

RIP.

[greatauntoftriplets]

1. He captured the essence of the West Indies.

[JHan]

2. Yes, and he understood so well the little idiosyncrasies of each island..

it was one of his poems that made me love poetry itself.

[greatauntoftriplets]

3. He was a rare person and will be missed.

His perspective was unique and described a world that people staying at all-inclusive resorts miss because they never explore the real island.

[JHan]

6. even when I disagreed with him, he and Naipaul, Brathwaite, Rhys, and others..

all their stories/narratives resonate with truths, sometimes unpleasant.

[Tanuki]

4. The Sea is History

The Sea Is History
Derek Walcott, 1930 - 2017

Where are your monuments, your battles, martyrs?
Where is your tribal memory? Sirs,
in that grey vault. The sea. The sea
has locked them up. The sea is History.

First, there was the heaving oil,
heavy as chaos;
then, like a light at the end of a tunnel,

the lantern of a caravel,
and that was Genesis.
Then there were the packed cries,
the shit, the moaning:

Exodus.
Bone soldered by coral to bone,
mosaics
mantled by the benediction of the shark's shadow,

that was the Ark of the Covenant.
Then came from the plucked wires
of sunlight on the sea floor

the plangent harps of the Babylonian bondage,
as the white cowries clustered like manacles
on the drowned women,

and those were the ivory bracelets
of the Song of Solomon,
but the ocean kept turning blank pages

looking for History.
Then came the men with eyes heavy as anchors
who sank without tombs,

brigands who barbecued cattle,
leaving their charred ribs like palm leaves on the shore,
then the foaming, rabid maw

of the tidal wave swallowing Port Royal,
and that was Jonah,
but where is your Renaissance?

Sir, it is locked in them sea-sands
out there past the reef's moiling shelf,
where the men-o'-war floated down;

strop on these goggles, I'll guide you there myself.
It's all subtle and submarine,
through colonnades of coral,

past the gothic windows of sea-fans
to where the crusty grouper, onyx-eyed,
blinks, weighted by its jewels, like a bald queen;

and these groined caves with barnacles
pitted like stone
are our cathedrals,

and the furnace before the hurricanes:
Gomorrah. Bones ground by windmills
into marl and cornmeal,

and that was Lamentations—
that was just Lamentations,
it was not History;

then came, like scum on the river's drying lip,
the brown reeds of villages
mantling and congealing into towns,

and at evening, the midges' choirs,
and above them, the spires
lancing the side of God

as His son set, and that was the New Testament.

Then came the white sisters clapping
to the waves' progress,
and that was Emancipation—

jubilation, O jubilation—
vanishing swiftly
as the sea's lace dries in the sun,

but that was not History,
that was only faith,
and then each rock broke into its own nation;

then came the synod of flies,
then came the secretarial heron,
then came the bullfrog bellowing for a vote,

fireflies with bright ideas
and bats like jetting ambassadors
and the mantis, like khaki police,

and the furred caterpillars of judges
examining each case closely,
and then in the dark ears of ferns

and in the salt chuckle of rocks
with their sea pools, there was the sound
like a rumour without any echo

of History, really beginning.


"The Sea Is History" from Selected Poems by Derek Walcott. Copyright © 2007 by Derek Walcott. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC.

Derek Walcott

[JHan]

7. thanks for sharing..

The sea and tides are always in his work, speaking of something unresolved, a kind of metaphor for the "New World".

The first of his poems I loved was one of his earliest poems, The Harbor..

The Harbour

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
For the safe twilight which your calm hands gave.
And the night, urger of old lies
Winked at by stars that sentry the humped hills,
Should hear no secret faring-forth; time knows
That bitter and sly sea, and love raises walls.

Yet others who now watch my progress outward
On a sea which is crueler than any word
Of love, may see in me the calm my passage makes,
Braving new water in an antique hoax;
And the secure from thinking may climb safe to liners
Hearing small rumors of paddlers drowned near stars.

[Tanuki]

8. Thank you for this thread. I had not heard that he passed away.He used

to spend part of each year teaching in Boston when I lived there. I was always in awe of his talent and the magic of his language.

[JHan]

10. sounds like it was an amazing experience.

yes, there's a lot of magic in his use of language, and also sensitivity. I know he loved Rilke and Anna Akhmatova - both similarly evocative.

[Eugene]

5. RIP

[Blue_Tires]

9. r.i.p.

[CTyankee]

11. I had a grad school course in love poetry and remember him as writing a beautiful love poem...

lovely poem about love...it's buried in my long forgotten Master's Thesis but it is there forever...

[JHan]

12. was it this?

The time will come
when, with elation
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror
and each will smile at the other's welcome,

and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.

[CTyankee]

13. Yes! I think it is titled "Love After Love."

Wonderful poem.