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chapter 11

The Bounty of Derek Walcott

Derek Walcott has lived in the quarrel of two languages, the patoisof his Caribbean birth and the drenched, nightingale tones of Brit-ish literature, one a harbor of memory and the other a heritage ofguilt and betrayal as well as gratitude. Among poets writing in En-glish in our late half-century, Walcott has been the most torturedby divisions of the tongue; and his stateless, passport-clenched ex-istence (international poets live in airports) has only increased thefatal lure of home. His last book, the windy and flawed Omeros(1990), attempted to shrink the Iliad and Odyssey into the tiny sinsand squabbles of some Caribbean fishermen and bewildered colo-nials. The present enacted the myths of the past, as if all our odys-seys might be the Odyssey; but the present could not replace thepast by remaining in debt to it.

The Bounty is a retrospective volume, full of elegy and apologia,turning from the death of the poet’s mother to a long sequencecoiled in the comforts but wary of the confines of his home islandSt. Lucia. The brazen confidence of Walcott’s verse refuses themap-drawn boundaries of politics:

Between the vision of the Tourist Board and the trueParadise lies the desert where Isaiah’s elationsforce a rose from the sand. The thirty-third canto

cores the dawn clouds with concentric radiance,the breadfruit opens its palms in praise of the bounty,bois-pain, tree of bread, slave food, the bliss of John Clare,

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torn, wandering Tom, stoat-stroker in his countyof reeds and stalk-crickets, fiddling the dank air,lacing his boots with vines, steering glazed beetles

with the tenderest prods, knight of the cockchafer,wrapped in the mists of shires, their snail-horned steeplespalms opening to the cupped pool.

Walcott is a master of such easy, careless abundance, the stunnedeloquence of his lines descending from the heavens to the homelybeetle. Here the biblical prophet rises from Caribbean sands, thesky is Dante’s Paradiso, and the doomed Bounty brings its breadfruittrees (a bounty themselves) from the South Pacific to feed theslaves. For Walcott life is lived in its literature, the wanderings ofmad John Clare also the wanderings of Tom o’ Bedlam, the realpoet acting the rule of fiction. The sly ironies that give the TouristBoard a “vision,” as if even our commerce were prophetic, permitthis mirage of the real in the false realm of literature. “I myself ama fiction,” Walcott says in one poem. When are we not heir to ourfictions?

Walcott is a great charmer, his language full of pleasing vanity,preening before the mirror of the literary past. He can pack apoem with allusion as if stuffing a Christmas goose, but you cantell how much he longs to seduce himself—he’s so busy with se-duction he sometimes forgets the poem has somewhere to get to.

The epic scale of Omeros exposed Walcott’s concentrated talentsto his considerable flaws. Line by line the poem flaunted the ex-haustive verbal gift not matched in his generation by anyone butLowell (Walcott’s imagery as rich if not always as original). Thepoem had dozens of dazzling occasions, but the characters wereinsectlike versions of their Homeric selves; the masterplot of theIliad broke down in the middle (as the narrator began to gallivantfrom city to city like a poet on a reading tour); when the protago-nist Achille had a sunstroke dream of Africa, it was a sentimentalrehash of Roots. The poet’s climactic “duet” with Homer was intro-duced when Homer asked, about a young woman, “Did you, youknow, do it often?”

Despite his fluent and deceptive language, despite a career rest-

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less in its forms, Walcott has written few poems memorable as po-ems. There is intoxicating writing, with striking images by thecartload (if they come from the warehouse at times, most poetswork out of a shed), but rarely a poem that bullies its way intomemory the way poems by Lowell or Bishop or Larkin or Audenor Hecht often do. What you remember in Walcott is the texture,never the text.

The long sequence that forms the greater part of The Bounty isbadly organized and diffuse, composed less in verse than unme-tered rhyming prose (though a gorgeous oratorical prose). Walcottrevisits his old haunts—St. Lucia, New England, Europe—withmortality in mind; and the way he nurses his wounds, his refusal ofhis native tongue (he’s a Philoctetes of old poison, and his wound ishis tongue), makes the ancient difficulties darker and more depriv-ing than ever. Walcott worries the artist’s position, the distance artdemands from his life. Nervously attentive to his literary airs,deeply immersed in the language of empire, he fails to see that hispoems are drowning in the empire’s dreams. His romantic wish tomerge with the paradise he’s been driven from wallows happily inromantic blather (“O leaves, multiply the days of my absence andsubtract them / from the humiliation of punishment, the ambushof disgrace”), but he understands his paradise is haunted by Eu-rope. His vision of Europe, of European literature, is of merchan-dise and the hot appetites of capital:

Europe fulfilled its silhouette in the nineteenth centurywith steaming train-stations, gas-lamps, encyclopedias,the expanding waists of empires, an appetite for inventoryin the novel as a market roaring with ideas.Bound volumes echoed city-blocks of paragraphswith ornate parenthetical doorways, crowds on one marginwaiting to cross to the other page; as pigeons gurgle epigraphsfor the next chapter, in which old cobbles beginthe labyrinth of a twisted plot.

In both worlds, the lines are heavy with habitat, never one imagewhen half a dozen will do. This surfeit of the visual cannot repay

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the losses the poet has suffered, the life estranged in the medium ofits language. The poems run on in near panic, their once crisp im-ages an impressionist blur.

In late-afternoon light the tops of the breadfruit leavesare lemon and the lower leaves a waxen viridianwith the shaped shadows greenish black over the eavesof the shops and the rust-crusted fences that are Indianred, sepia, and often orange; but by then the light hasripened and grass and the sides of the houses and even arooster crossing a yard blazes like a satrap.

Walcott has to try hard to write badly, but The Bounty often lacksthe language of resonant detail that takes the attentions of the vi-sual beyond mere decoration. His rhetoric is as powerful as a trum-pet, but every line has the same emphasis—you scarcely knowwhere the crescendi are, because they’re all crescendi.

The Nobel laureate’s early poems were jagged, nervy celebra-tions of the seen (a young man’s one-man talent show). Though Iadmire the idiosyncratic autobiography of Another Life (1973), hisstrongest poems (often influenced by Lowell) were in books of hismiddle period, Sea Grapes (1976), The Star-Apple Kingdom (1979),The Fortunate Traveller (1981), and The Arkansas Testament (1987).The Bounty, in its airless and sublime self-indulgence, its dissolu-tion into mere writing, resembles the tedious run-on grandilo-quence of Midsummer (1984), another book of days. It is in hisbriefer lyrics, and not the rambling sequences or ambitious epics,that Walcott’s vision discovers the anatomy of his loss.