Never Get Used to Derek Walcott's Poetry

Never get used to this begins Derek Walcott in a poem from The Bounty (1997). That could mean, "Wow, I never do get used to this" or, "Note to Self: never allow yourself to get used to this!" Walcott always means both/and not either/or.

This in context means both sunrise over the ocean viewed from the Caribbean island St. Lucia, where he was born, and the craft by which he explored that ocean -- craft meaning both a boat such as the one he sees on the horizon and the craft of writing poetry. Though he feels his gift fading out of this page and gently mocks the poetry of his younger self -- what did it know of death? Only what you had read of it -- he is grateful. He plays with phrases from Roman Catholic practice, the Ave Maria when he replaces ocean "waves" with Aves, the rosary in regard to the surf fingering its beads, and "Hail Mary full of grace" with hail heron and gull full of grace. Joking aside, he tells himself that he has come to his end praising and giving thanks. By the end of the poem, he's thinking of the same seascape at night, and the yachts studying their reflections in the water like black glass -- which suggests both literal boats and a peripatetic Nobel-prize-winner pondering his life.

This poem set off fireworks in the margins of my copy from Selected Poems (Edward Baugh, ed., 2007), where my pen made arcs, stars, and circles to mark all those both/ands and other features: the stately iambic pace; rhymes and other wordplay; his painter's eye for visual details; healthy self-deprecation; the horizon where, in numerous poems, he sees both his home when he's away and the world beyond when he's home; and gratitude that toes the edge of faith but never wades in. I wrote a note on the back flap that this one poem encapsulates what I've learned to enjoy in all of Walcott's work.

I wrote the same note about a dozen more of his poems, at least. In all my notes, I've been telling myself Never get used to -- and never forget:

• His visit to Arkansas, ca. 1986. Walking before sunrise from his hotel past a Confederate memorial, he is suddenly aware that police nearby would likely take interest in a large black man out at that hour. In the silence that falls when he enters the diner, A fork clicks / on its plate; a cough's rifle shot / shivers the chandeliered room. The allusions to a rifle and trigger bring an overtone of violence into a mundane scene, typical of how Walcott regularly layers metaphorical meaning over literal details. ("Arkansas Testament" 203)
• A belfry like the exclamation point at the end of a Swiss village (from The Prodigal 289)
• A hotel worker in Rome who also embodies Rome in herself:

  She stacks up the popes like towels in cathedral drawers;
  now in her stone kitchen, under the domes of onions,
  she slices a light, as thick as cheese, into epochs. (from Midsummer, II, 174)

• Coming home from the beach with his twin brother used to be such a thing! he remembers in The Prodigal (295): The body would be singing / with salt, the sunlight hummed through the skin and iced water was a gasping benediction
• A walk up a hill to a baptism at an Episcopal church in Laventile, Trinidad in a 1965 poem is also a journey through class and time. To go downhill from here, he writes, is to ascend in socio-economic class. Thinking of the Middle Passage through which all their ancestors arrived here, Walcott sees that the poor there are still clamped below their hatch, / breeding like felonies / whose lives revolve around prison, graveyard, church. Walcott mocks the pretensions of the Episcopalians who have given themselves whole-heartedly to the rites and ways of their old colonial overlords.
• The comedy of a middle-aged poet, world traveller, jostled on public transport by working-class people from the neighborhood where he grew up. He admires the beautiful young woman across the aisle as if he were painting her, calling her the light of the world. After a basket-laden old woman on the street yells at the driver, Pas quittez moi a terre, literally, don't leave me on this earth, Walcott rings changes on her phrase to the point of feeling guilty for having abandoned his people on this earth. Ready to weep, he exits the bus at his luxury hotel, only to be given another light in an act of kindness by the driver. ("The Light of the World" 184)
• Gentle assurance from beyond the grave to a family grieving for a child

  I am not young now, nor old, not a child, nor a bud

  snipped before it flowered, I am part of the muscle
  of a galloping lion, or a bird keeping low over

  dark canes; and what, in your sorrow, in our faces
  howling like statues, you call a goodbye

  is--I wish you would listen to me--a different welcome... ("For Adrian" 196).

Allegations of sexual harassment surfaced after Walcott's death in 2017. I'm not surprised: I don't sense that he took women seriously. Except for Walcott's mother, women do not have a voice in the poems I've read. They are described by their attractive parts. In contrast, Walcott writes long poems dedicated to his male friends, including Joseph Brodsky and Seamus Heaney, in which he focuses on their writing, their ideas, their conversations, their virtues. Even Walcott's numerous wives are mentioned only with passing regret for his not caring enough for them.

So, like many poets, he may not have lived up to his best work. I know little about Walcott beyond what's in the verses. Some of those got too specialized for me -- I couldn't make headway through Omeros, his Nobel-prize winning transposition of the Odyssey to the Caribbean of his childhood. Tiepelo's Hound, which is both a biography of a Renaissance painter and a memoir of his own artistic development, has great moments, but reading it was like solving a puzzle.

Even so, his precise language and rich layering of metaphor on reality serve largely to express praise and gratitude. As Robert Frost said about poetry in general, reading the poetry of Derek Walcott "is a way of remembering what it would impoverish us to forget."