the poetry of seamus heaney walcott

IB English 2 Mr. Dale / Mr. Sanders

Contemporary Poets:

Seamus Heaney and

Derek Walcott

SEAMUS HEANEY & DEREK WALCOTT POETRY UNIT

Introduction: Rhyme, Meter, Iambic Pentameter

How Many Feet Poetry Terms to Remember and Use

Seamus Heaney: Biography

(http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1995/heaney-bio.html) Article

(http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/articles/heaney/index.html)

Poems: Digging (1966)

Death of a Naturalist (1966) Mid-term Break (1966) Blackberry-Picking (1966) Follower (1966) Bogland (1969) Anahorish (1972) The Tollund Man (1972) Mossbawn 1. Sunlight (1975) North (1975) Punishment (1975) Act of Union (1975) Exposure (1975) Glanmore Sonnet IX (1979) Villanelle for an Anniversary (1986) Alphabets (1987) From the Frontier of Writing (1987) The Haw Lantern (1987) From the Republic of Conscience (1987) Lightenings viii (1991) The Skylight (1991)

Derek Walcott Biography (from http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1992/) Article (from

http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/articles/mjoberg/index.html)

Poems: Prelude to In a Green Night (1948)

A Far Cry from Africa (1957) A City's Death by Fire (1962) Parang (1962) A Letter from Brooklyn (1962) Codicil (1965) Crusoe’s Island (1965) Missing The Sea (1965) A Map of Europe (1965) Blues (1969) Midsummer, Tobago (1976) Sea Canes (1976) Sea Grapes (1976) Old New England (1981) North and South (1981) Upstate (1981) The Fortunate Traveler (1981) Midsummer XXVII (1984) Pentecost (1987) Fame (1987)

Appendices: • “The Gift and the Craft: An Approach to the Study of the Poetry of Seamus Heaney” by Elmer

Andrews • “Derek Walcott: An Island Poet and His Sea” by Mark A. McWatt

Other Sources Worth Finding

Heaney Reading “Bogland” http://www.ibiblio.org/ipa/poems/heaney/bogland.php

Heaney Reading “The Tollund Man” http://www.ibiblio.org/ipa/poems/heaney/the_tollund_man.php Heaney Reading of “Lightenings” http://www.ibiblio.org/ipa/poems/heaney/from_lightenings.php

Audio Recording “The Skylight” http://writersalmanac.publicradio.org/programs/2003/04/21/index.html

Interviews with Derek Walcott http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbcfour/audiointerviews/profilepages/walcottd1.shtml Derek Walcott: A Life in Poetry

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=8962854 Derek Walcott interviewed by Charlie Rose (video) http://www.charlierose.com/guests/derek-walcott

Recall… A one-foot line is called monometer A two-foot line is called dimeter A three-foot line is called trimeter A four-foot line is called tetrameter A five-foot line is called pentameter A six-foot line is called hexameter A seven-foot line is called heptameter An eight-foot line is called octameter

HOW MANY FEET?

“Epitaph on an Infant” by Samuel Taylor Coleridge Ere sin could blight or sorrow fade, Death came with friendly care; The opening bud to heaven conveyed, And bade it blossom there. Lord Byron “Youth and Age” 'Tis but as ivy-leaves around the ruin'd turret wreathe, All green and wildly fresh without, but worn and gray beneath. “Mr. Christian’s Diary” by Timoth Murphy Our vessel is a venue where injustice swiftly moves. “The floggings will continue until the morale improves.” “Frost at Midnight” by Samuel Taylor Coleridge The Frost performs its secret ministry, Unhelped by any wind. The owlet's cry Came loud, -and hark, again! loud as before. “The Robin” by Thomas Hardy When up aloft I fly and fly, I see in pools The shining sky, And a happy bird Am I, am I! “How Do I Love Thee? “ by Elizabeth Barrett Browning How do I love thee? Let me count the ways. “Annabel Lee” by Edgar Allan Poe It was many and many a year ago, In a kingdom by the sea,

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Rhythm and Meter in English Poetry (from the website of Al Filreis, Professor of English, University of Pennsylvania)

English poetry employs five basic rhythms of varying stressed (/) and unstressed (x) syllables. The meters are iambs, trochees, spondees, anapests and dactyls. In this document the stressed syllables are marked in boldface type rather than the tradition al "/" and "x." Each unit of rhythm is called a "foot" of poetry. The meters with two-syllable feet are IAMBIC (x /) : That time of year thou mayst in me behold TROCHAIC (/ x): Tell me not in mournful numbers SPONDAIC (/ /): Break, break, break/ On thy cold gray stones, O Sea! Meters with three-syllable feet are ANAPESTIC (x x /): And the sound of a voice that is still

DACTYLIC (/ x x): This is the forest primeval, the murmuring pines and the hemlock (a trochee replaces the final dactyl)

Each line of a poem contains a certain number of feet of iambs, trochees, spondees, dactyls or anapests. A line of one foot is a monometer, 2 feet is a dimeter, and so on--trimeter (3), tetrameter (4), pentameter (5), hexameter (6), heptameter (7), and o ctameter (8). The number of syllables in a line varies therefore according to the meter. A good example of trochaic monometer, for example, is this poem entitled "Fleas": Adam Had'em. Here are some more serious examples of the various meters.

Iambic pentameter (5 iambs, 10 syllables) That time | of year | thou mayst | in me | behold (Shakepeare’s Sonnet 73)

Trochaic tetrameter (4 trochees, 8 syllables)

Tell me | not in | mournful | numbers (Longfellow’s “The Song of Life”)

Anapestic trimeter (3 anapests, 9 syllables) And the sound | of a voice | that is still (Tennyson’s “Break, Break, Break”)

Dactylic hexameter (6 dactyls, 17 syllables; a trochee replaces the last dactyl

This is the | forest pri | meval, the | murmuring | pine and the | hemlocks (Longfellow’s “Evangline”)

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Poetry Terms to Remember and Use None of these definitions alone will help you to read, understand, or enjoy any poem. The study of poetry is not, after all, a mechanical process of searching for techniques and devices. These definitions are useful only insofar as they elucidate or expand upon meaning; use them appropriately. Alliteration: Repetition of the initial sound of words in verse.

Underline the repeating ‘l sounds’ in the following excerpt: I saw you from that very window there

Making the gravel leap and leap in air, Leap up, like that, like that, and land so lightly And roll back down the mound beside the hole.

(“Home Burial” by Robert Frost)

Sometimes alliteration includes the repetition of both initial sounds and interior sounds of words, as in “blueberry.” It is also, then, known as consonance.

Assonance: Repetition of vowel sounds within words in a line or lines of verse. In effect, such repletion creates a near-rhyme.

(The end of the passage from “Home Burial” provided under alliteration includes three examples of assonance: a repeated ‘a sound,’ ‘o sound,’ and ‘ow sound.’ Can you find them?)

Rhyme: The effect produced when similar vowel sounds chime together and where the final consonant sound is also in agreement e.g. 'bat' and 'cat'. A poem’s rhyme scheme is the pattern of rhyming words, typically found at the end of lines. Rhythm and Meter: No study of any poetic language would be complete without a consideration of meter. Understand that metered poetry has a steady rhythm but that the meter is actually most important and revealing in the moments of variation, moments where the rhythm deviates from the patterned rhythm of the rest of the poem. These metric changes very often mark moments of change in the poem’s theme or emotional impact.

Foot: the metrical unit by which a line of poetry is measured. A foot usually consists of one stressed and one or two unstressed syllables.

Iamb: a metrical foot consisting of an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed one. Trochee: a metrical foot consisting of a stressed syllable followed by an unstressed one ("Homer"). Dactyl: a metrical foot consisting of a stressed syllable followed by two unstressed ones. (“Canada,” “holiday,” “camouflage.”) Anapest: a metrical foot consisting of two unstressed syllables followed by a stressed one. Spondee: a metrical foot consisting of a pair of stressed syllables ("Dead set").

Lines are named for their number and type of feet.

- A one-foot line is called monometer - A two-foot line is called dimeter - A three-foot line is called trimeter - A four-foot line is called tetrameter - A five-foot line is called pentameter (This is the most common meter employed by poets writing in

English.) - A six-foot line is called hexameter - A seven-foot line is called heptameter - An eight-foot line is called octameter

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Seamus Heaney was born in April 1939, the eldest member of a family which would eventually contain nine children. His father owned and worked a small farm of some fifty acres in County Derry in Northern Ireland, but the father's real commitment was to cattle-dealing. There was something very congenial to Patrick Heaney about the cattle-dealer's way of life to which he was introduced by the uncles who had cared for him after the early death of his own parents. The poet's mother came from a family called McCann whose connections were more with the modern world than with the traditional rural economy; her uncles and relations were employed in the local linen mill and an aunt had worked "in

service" to the mill owners' family. The poet has commented on the fact that his parentage thus contains both the Ireland of the cattle-herding Gaelic past and the Ulster of the Industrial Revolution; indeed, he considers this to have been a significant tension in his background, something which corresponds to another inner tension also inherited from his parents, namely that between speech and silence. His father was notably sparing of talk and his mother notably ready to speak out, a circumstance which Seamus Heaney believes to have been fundamental to the "quarrel with himself" out of which his poetry arises. Heaney grew up as a country boy and attended the local primary school. As a very young child, he watched American soldiers on manoeuvres in the local fields, in preparation for the Normandy invasion of 1944. They were stationed at an aerodrome which had been built a mile or so from his home and once again Heaney has taken this image of himself as a consciousness poised between "history and ignorance" as representative of the nature of his poetic life and development. Even though his family left the farm where he was reared (it was called Mossbawn) in 1953, and even though his life since then has been a series of moves farther and farther away from his birthplace, the departures have been more geographical than psychological: rural County Derry is the "country of the mind" where much of Heaney's poetry is still grounded. When he was twelve years of age, Seamus Heaney won a scholarship to St. Columb's College, a Catholic boarding school situated in the city of Derry, forty miles away from the home farm, and this first departure from Mossbawn was the decisive one. It would be followed in years to come by a transfer to Belfast where he lived between 1957 and 1972, and by another move from Belfast to the Irish Republic where Heaney has made his home, and then, since 1982, by regular, annual periods of teaching in America. All of these subsequent shifts and developments were dependent, however, upon that original journey from Mossbawn which the poet has described as a removal from "the earth of farm labour to the heaven of education." It is not surprising, then, that this move has turned out to be a recurrent theme in his work, from "Digging", the first poem in his first book, through the much more

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orchestrated treatment of it in "Alphabets"(The Haw Lantern, 1987), to its most recent appearance in "A Sofa in the Forties" which was published this year in The Spirit Level. At St. Columb's College, Heaney was taught Latin and Irish, and these languages, together with the Anglo-Saxon which he would study while a student of Queen's University, Belfast, were determining factors in many of the developments and retrenchments which have marked his progress as a poet. The first verses he wrote when he was a young teacher in Belfast in the early 1960s and many of the best known poems in North, his important volume published in 1975, are linguistically tuned to the Anglo-Saxon note in English. His poetic line was much more resolutely stressed and packed during this period than it would be in the eighties and nineties when the "Mediterranean" elements in the literary and linguistic heritage of English became more pronounced. Station Island (1984) reveals Dante, for example, as a crucial influence, and echoes of Virgil - as well as a translation from Book VI of The Aeneid - are to be found in Seeing Things (1991). Heaney's early study of Irish bore fruit in the translation of the Middle Irish story of Suibhne Gealt in Sweeney Astray (1982) and in several other translations and echoes and allusions: the Gaelic heritage has always has been part of his larger keyboard of reference and remains culturally and politically central to the poet and his work. Heaney's poems first came to public attention in the mid-1960s when he was active as one of a group of poets who were subsequently recognized as constituting something of a "Northern School" within Irish writing. Although Heaney is stylistically and temperamentally different from such writers as Michael Longley and Derek Mahon (his contemporaries), and Paul Muldoon, Medbh McGuckian and Ciaran Carson (members of a younger Northern Irish generation), he does share with all of them the fate of having be en born into a society deeply divided along religious and political lines, one which was doomed moreover to suffer a quarter-century of violence, polarization and inner distrust. This had the effect not only of darkening the mood of Heaney's work in the 1970s, but also of giving him a deep preoccupation with the question of poetry's responsibilities and prerogatives in the world, since poetry is poised between a need for creative freedom within itself and a pressure to express the sense of social obligation felt by the poet as citizen. The essays in Heaney's three main prose collections, but especially those in The Government of the Tongue (1988) and The Redress of Poetry (1995), bear witness to the seriousness which this question assumed for him as he was coming into his own as a writer. These concerns also lie behind Heaney's involvement for a decade and a half with Field Day, a theatre company founded in 1980 by the playwright Brian Friel and the actor Stephen Real. Here, he was also associated with the poets Seamus Deane and Tom Paul in, and the singer David Hammond in a project which sought to bring the artistic and intellectual focus of its members into productive relation with the crisis that was ongoing in Irish political life. Through a series of plays and pamphlets (culminating in Heaney's case in his version of Sophocles' Philoctetes which the company produced and toured in 1990 under the title, The Cure at Troy), Field Day contributed greatly to the vigour of the cultural debate which flourished throughout the 1980s and 1990s in Ireland.

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Heaney's beginnings as a poet coincided with his meeting the woman whom he was to marry and who was to be the mother of his three children. Marie Devlin, like her husband, came from a large family, several of whom are themselves writers and artists, including the poet's wife who has recently published an important collection of retellings of the classic Irish myths and legends (Over Nine Waves, 1994). Marie Heaney has been central to the poet's life, both professionally and imaginatively, appearing directly and indirectly in individual poems from all periods of his oeuvre right down to the most recent, and making it possible for him to travel annually to Harvard by staying on in Dublin as custodian of the growing family and the family home. The Heaneys had spent a very liberating year abroad in 1970/71 when Seamus was a visiting lecturer at the Berkeley campus of the University of California. It was the sense of self-challenge and new scope which he experienced in the American context that encouraged him to resign his lectureship at Queen's University (1966-72) not long after he returned to Ireland, and to move to a cottage in County Wicklow in order to work full time as a poet and free-lance writer. A few years later, the family moved to Dublin and Seamus worked as a lecturer in Carysfort College, a teacher training college, where he functioned as Head of the English Department until 1982, when his present arrangement with Harvard University came into existence. This allows the poet to spend eight months at home without teaching in exchange for one semester's work at Harvard. In 1984, Heaney was named Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory, one of the university's most prestigious offices. In 1989, he was elected for a five-year period to be Professor of Poetry at Oxford University, a post which requires the incumbent to deliver three public lectures every year but which does not require him to reside in Oxford. In the course of his career, Seamus Heaney has always contributed to the promotion of artistic and educational causes, both in Ireland and abroad. While a young lecturer at Queen's University, he was active in the publication of pamphlets of poetry by the rising generation and took over the running of an influential poetry workshop which had been established there by the English poet, Philip Hobsbaum, when Hobsbaum left Belfast in 1966. He also served for five years on The Arts Council in the Republic of Ireland (1973-1978) and over the years has acted as judge and lecturer for countless poetry competitions and literary conferences, establishing a special relationship with the annual W.B. Yeats International Summer School in Sligo. In recent years, he has been the recipient of several honorary degrees; he is a member of Aosdana, the Irish academy of artists and writers, and a Foreign Member of The American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 1996, subsequent to his winning the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1995, he was made a Commandeur de L'Ordre des Arts et Lettres by the French Ministry of Culture. From Les Prix Nobel. The Nobel Prizes 1995, Editor Tore Frängsmyr, [Nobel Foundation], Stockholm, 1996 This autobiography/biography was written at the time of the award and later published in the book series Les Prix Nobel/Nobel Lectures. The information is sometimes updated with an addendum submitted by the Laureate. To cite this document, always state the source as shown above.

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This Is Not a Spade: The Poetry of SeamusHeaneyby Ola Larsmo20 February 2007

At the core of Seamus Heaney's poetry a profound experience is revealed – that a gapexists between the totality of what can be said and the totality of all that can be witnessed,between the limits of languages and the margins of the actual world in which we live. ForHeaney 'poetry' is a means of measuring this gap – if not bridging it.

In Heaney's early poems this gap is connected to a sense of deep loss and even of moralguilt. The young poet keeps encountering a growing distance between the world oflanguage and the physical world he sees around him. In a biographical sense, this may belinked to the fact of being born within an agrarian society where the poet has his roots, butfrom which the gifts of language and education has excluded him, so that he does not fullybelong there any more. This distance is superbly captured in his poem 'Digging', from thedebut collection Death of a Naturalist (1966).

The young Heaney sits by his desk, pen in hand, and watches his father digging in thegarden. As both come from a long line of Ulster farmers, the father is doing what theHeaneys have been doing for generations: tending the land.

by God, the old man could handle a spade.Just like his old man.

The son does something different:

But I've no spade to follow men like them.Between my finger and my thumbThe squat pen rests.I'll dig with it.

The son has moved into a different world, yet, through his words, both tasks becomerelated. Both dig beneath the surface of things, cultivating the possibilities of what maygrow. In this early poem – the first one in his Selected Poems – Heaney uses a rhetoricfigure that for a considerable period would be his trademark: the 'chiasma', or crossing ofthemes. The poem starts out with the image of the pen, and goes on to relate what couldbe termed as the young intellectual's respect and awe for the seemingly commonplace skillsof the working man, represented by his father's 'spademanship' – before the focus returnsto the pen, which has now been transformed to a tool for hard work – which Heaney enlistsin the genealogical, or historical, line of working men. The pen and the spade trade placesand within the course of the poem, quite literally, became metaphors for each other. Spade-as-pen; pen-as-spade.

This 'crossing of themes' is a method that Heaney uses repeatedly. In one of the morequoted of his 'Glanmore Sonnets' from the collection Field Work (1979) you can see themore mature poet playing with the same method of building a poem, only now in a moreintricate fashion:

Outside the kitchen window a black ratSways on the briar like infected fruit:‘It looked me through, it stared me out, I'm notImagining things. Go you out to it.'Did we come to the wilderness for this?

We have our burnished bay tree at the gate,Classical, hung with the reek of silageFrom the next farm, tart-leafed as inwit.Blood on a pitchfork, blood on chaff and hay,Rats speared in the sweat and dust of threshing –What is my apology for poetry?

The empty briar is swishing

This Is Not a Spade: The Poetry of Seamus Heaney http://nobelprize.org/cgi-bin/print?from=%2Fnobel_prizes%2Fli...

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When I come down, and beyond, inside, your faceHaunts like a new moon glimpsed through tangled glass.

A poem such as this becomes almost mathematical in its precision. On the way downstairsthe writing "I" of the poem has identified himself with the small, exposed and wordlessliving thing, the rat: at the end of the poem the "I" looks up at the window, himself in theposition of the rat. In the last stanza the poet has traded places with the rat itself, theintruder, that threatening piece of nature.

Halfway there you find the real hinge of the poem, the place where things trade places: the"bay tree", symbol of poetry and a classic heritage, "reek with silage". A familiar, ruralsmell, in itself a modern phenomenon of the countryside, is projected onto the symbol ofantiquity. And the moral problem from the poem 'Digging' presents itself again.

Blood on a pitchfork, blood on chaff and hay,Rats speared in the sweat and dust of threshing –What is my apology for poetry?

Does poetry need an excuse? Or a defence: the word "apology" is, of course, ambiguous. Inthe sheer face of bloody violence, the everyday slaughter in the farmyard or the politicalviolence of Irish history, past and present – what place is there for poetry at all, what rolecan this heightened form of language play in the face of crisis, death, distress?

This is the question addressed in one of Heaneys' best essays on literature and the'meaning' of poetry, 'Feeling into Words' (in Preoccupations, 1980). He takes his startingpoint in a quote from one of Shakespeare's Sonnets, number 65: "How, with this rage, shallbeauty hold a plea?"

This question is central to Heaney's own poetry and to his prose writings about his ownpoetry and that by others: among his close, literary 'relatives' you find a number of otherNobel Laureates, such as Joseph Brodsky, Derek Walcott and Czesław Miłosz. How thenshould beauty, or poetry, hold a plea?

The answer, that slowly works its way to the surface in all of Heaney's writings, is quitestraightforward. By showing us things as they are.

As he writes in another of the 'Glanmore Sonnets', which takes its poetic impulse from theBBC weather report:

Dogger. Rockall. Malin. Irish Sea:Green, swift upsurges, North Atlantic fluxConjured by that strong gale-warning voice,Collapse into a sibilant penumbra.(…)

L'Etoile, Le Guillemot, La Belle HeleneNursed their bright names this morning in the bayThat toiled like mortar. It was marvellousAnd actual. I said out loud, 'A haven,'The word deepening, clearing, like the skyElsewhere on Minches, Cromarty, The Faroes.

The "actual" is "A haven". Heaney creates a way in which you learn to see the actual world


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around you, in a new light. But "seeing" in the Heaney sense can mean two things, twoconcepts which we find in the centre of modernist poetry; 'epiphany' and 'correspondence'.

It is quite simple: 'epiphany' is here, as in the works of James Joyce and TomasTranströmer, the moment where you experience a sudden insight into the meaning of thingsseemingly trivial, for example the BBC weather forecast – how it in itself can contain aworld of life, of thousands of living people along a coastline, exposed to the same weather,something very real as the rain and the wind – as opposed to strange political ideas of'purity', 'nation' or 'race'. A haven.

'Correspondence', on the other hand, is when you realise previously invisible connectionsbetween things, connections perhaps only made possible through the special kind oflanguage we call poetry. The most obvious case of correspondences in Heaneys' work youfind in the suite of poems he wrote in the early seventies, where he – again likeTranströmer – shows his fascination with the 'bog bodies', the startlingly well-preservedremains of prisoners executed and buried in peat bogs in Denmark in prehistoric times. Themost well known example is 'the Tollund man', who was strangled somewhere around theyear 350 B.C., and was sunk into a peat bog outside of Silkeborg in Denmark.

The custom of human sacrifice combined with the burial of the victims in bogs is connectedto the Celtic culture of the time, a point driven home by Heaney in his poems about the'bog bodies' in Wintering Out (1972) where he openly compares the – in our eyes –senseless murder of human beings, for the sake of an abstract god or goddess, to theslaughter of men and women, for the abstract ideas of nationalism and loyalism, in his owncontemporary Ulster.

The here and now is a sanctuary, we live in a real world, it has to be seen, you have toexperience its stark reality if you are not to succumb to seductive ideologies. But, on theother hand: everything you see is in itself connected to a vibrating sense of history,everything has meanings beyond itself, and beyond your own life. That is the paradox, ifyou will, that you find in Heaney's earlier poetry.

But a paradox can, strangely enough, be something very stable. You have 'this' on the onehand, and 'that' on the other. The first phase of Heaney's poetry can rest almostcomfortably in that kind of balance. A metaphor is introduced in the first stanza and recurs,with its meaning turned inside out, in the last. This kind of irony has its place. But Heaney'spoetry has continued to grow and change. It has become more restless.

This change is visible in a collection like Electric Light from 2001. Nothing has been lost, butnew elements have been added. In the poem that gives the book its title, you recognize the'old' Heaney:

In the first house where I saw electric light,She sat with her fur-lined felt slippers unzippedYear in, year out, in the same chair, and whisperedIn a voice that at its loudest did nothing elseBut whisper.

In this poem you see the weaving together of the old, rural community – here representedby the poets' grandparents, the oral storytelling, the old farmhouse with the stable on theother side of the bedroom wall. And the electric light, the "wireless" set with its green eyeand voices from afar. Vintage Heaney.

But in the same volume you also find a poem like 'The Loose Box' – a strange, winding talethat starts out in an ordinary, abandoned stable, somewhere in the northern Irishcountryside – and then moves on to the birth of Jesus on a bed of straw, in another stable– and then covers the fall of Troy (with the use of a wooden horse, filled with straw), to thedeath of Irish revolutionary Michael Collins in the civil war – and his own background in thecountryside, in the stable, on the straw. You could boil it all down to one sentence: "all fleshis straw" – but it is not a stable poem in the way that Heaney's poems used to be stable.Something happens here, in a pun or word-play with the word "stable" – and all of historycomes undone, spilling into the poets' own biography, spilling straw. It is a magnificentpoem. It is like seeing a sail flapping in the wind, not because the ship has lost itsmomentum but because it is ready to change its course.


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This tendency to outgrow the balances and ironies of the earlier phases is very visible inSeamus Heaney's latest collection to date, District and Circle (2006). The district and circlein the title shows itself to be the subway system, subterranean connections deepunderground. All the elements from his earlier works are very present, like in the openingpoem about the old "turnip-snedder", an ancient piece of farming machinery that sitsabandoned in a barn somewhere – but still loaded with meaning and threat, as beingwatched by a child that now has grown up to become a poet: "this is the way that God seeslife." A churning mechanism, impersonal, forceful, ready to crush turnips and boys' fingersalike.

District and Circle is also a book that digs deeper and deeper into memory: it recallsboyhood encounters, the American presence in Northern Ireland during World War II, eventhe 'Tollund man' himself makes a guest appearance. But the very method of this 'new'poetry is not to balance things evenly on a scale, but to make them merge, go up into eachother.

This is very visible in the subway poem. Heaney has written about the "underground"before, in the opening poem of Station Island (1984) where the poet, hurrying through theLondon subway, finds himself transformed into Orpheus, dreading the moment when he hasto look back over his shoulder.

That was a poem about death, about loss. The same is true about District and Circle: the"underground" is here the realm of the dead, too, something that becomes apparent in theopening lines:

Tunes from a tin-whistle undergroundCurled up a corridor I was walking down

Where the eerie music at the same time is that of a street musician and at the same timethe alluring music of the "people underground", the Tuatha de Danaan of Irish folk lore. Thepoem goes on in the same vein, with the vendor in the ticket booth being Charon, which isobvious without the poet mentioning it. Stepping onto the subway carriage becomes thepassing on, with all the other passengers, to another destination:

My back to the unclosed door, the platform empty;And wished it could have lasted

... and the poet sees his father's face in his own reflection in the window, it all leading up tothe final stanza:

And so by night and day to be transportedThrough galleried earth with them, the only relictOf all that I belonged to, hurtled forward,Reflecting in a window mirror-backedBy blasted weeping rock-walls Flicker-lit.

The distance between language and world is gone. The subway train is a subway train, nomore, no less; at the same time the voyage is a ritual passing from life to death, a fact thatis stated nowhere in the poem, but nonetheless becomes obvious to the reader. The train isno 'metaphor' for death, it is death.

This transformation is present in all the best poems in the volume. 'Poet to blacksmith'claims to be a translation of a letter from the Irish-speaking, 18th century poet Rua ÓSúilleabháin to his blacksmith, asking for a new kind of spade, perfect, shining, with "notrace of hammer to the blade".


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And best thing of all, the ring of it, sweet as a bell

The reader has no problem here recognizing the spade from 'Digging'. It is no longer aquestion of pen and spade trying to coexist, or doing 'the same thing'. They now are thevery same thing. The gap has, in one way at least, finally been bridged. By poetry itself.

As in 'A Shiver'. On the surface, a poem about knowing your tools, about craftsmanship orsilent knowledge: deeper down, about a labour that has been there all the time, throughoutforty years of writing:

The way you had to stand to swing the sledge,Your two knees locked, your lower back shock-fastAs shields in a testudo, spine and waistA pivot for the tight-braces, tilting rib-cage;The way its iron head planted the sledgeUnyieldingly as a club-footed last;The way you had to heft and then half-restIts gathered force like a long-nursed rageAbout to be let fly: do you goodTo have known it in your bones, directable,Withholdable at will,A first blow that could make air of a wall,A last one so unanswerably landedThe staked earth quailed and shivered in the handle?

Poetry is that shiver in the handle.

ReferencesDeath of a Naturalist (Faber & Faber, 1966).

Wintering Out (1972).

Field Work (Faber & Faber, 1979).

Preoccupations (essays, Faber & Faber 1980).

Electric Light (Faber & Faber, 2001).

District and Circle (Faber & Faber, 2006).


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Between my hnger and my thumbThe squat pen rests; snug as a gun.

Under my window, a clean rasping soundV\'nen the spade sinks into gravelly ground:My father, digging. I look down

Till his straining romp among the flowerbedsBends low, comes up twenty years awayStooping in rhythm through potato drillsWhere he was digging.

The coarse boot nestled on the lug, the shaftAgainst the inside knee was levered firmly.He rooted' out tall tops, buried the bright edge deepTo scatter new potatoes that we picked,Loving their cool hardness in our hands.

By God, the old man could handle a spade.Just like his old man.

My grandfather cut more turf in a dayThan any other man on Toner's bog.Once I carried him milk in a bottleCorked sloppily with paper. He straightened upTo drink it, then fell to right awayNicking and slicing neatly, heaving sodsOver his shoulder, going down and downFor the good turf. Digging.

The cold smell of potato mould, the squelch and slapOf soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edgeThrough living'roots awaken in my head.But I've no spade·to follow men like them.

Between my finger and my thumbThe squat pen rests.I'll dig with it.

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Death ofa Naturalist

All year the flax-dam festered in the heartOf the townland; green and heavy-headedFlax had rotted there, weighted down by huge sods.Daily it sweltered in the punishing sun.Bubbles gargled delicately, bluebottlesWove a strong gauze of sound around the smell.There were dragonflies, spotted butterflies,But best of all was the warm thick slobberOf frogspawn that grew like clotted waterIn the shade of the banks. Here, every springI would fill jampotfuls of the jelliedSpecks to range on window-sills at home,On shelves at school, and wait and watch untilThe fattening dots burst into nimble-Swimm.irig tadpoles. Miss Walls would tell us howThe daddy frog was called a bullfrogAnd how he croaked and how the mammy frogLaid hundreds of little eggs and this wasFrogspawn. You could tell the weather by frogs tooFor they were yellow in the sun and brownIn rain.

Then one hot day when fields were rankWith cowdung in the grass the angry frogsInvaded the flax-dam; I ducked through hedgesTo a coarse croaking that I had not heardBefore. The air was thick with a bass chorus.Right down the dam gross-bellied frogs were cockedOn sods; their loose necks pulsed like sails. Some hopped:The slap and plop were obscene threats. Some satPoised like mud grenades, their blunt heads Carting.I sickened, turned, and ran. The great slime kingsWere gathered there for vengeance and I knewThat if I dipped my hand the spawn would clutch it.

13

l\ /r'd ,....., B ._ 1.11. -1 enn 7-ea.1i

I sat all morning in the college sick bayCounting bells knelling classes to a close.At two o'clock our neighbours drove me home.

In the porch I met my father crying-He had always taken funerals in his strideAnd Big Jim Evans saying it was a hard blow.

The baby cooed and laughed and Tocked the pramWhen I came in, and I was embarrassedBy old men standing up to shake my band

And tell me they were 'sorry for my trouble'.Whispers informed strangers I was the eldest,Away at School, as my mother held my hand

In hers and coughed out angry tearless sighs.At ten o'clock the ambulance arrivedWith the corpse. stanched and bandaged by the nurs·es.

Next morning I went up into the rOOIn. SnowdropsAnd candles soothed the bedsidej I saw himFor the first time in six weeks. Paler no,v,

Wearing a poppy bruise on his left temple,He lay in the four-foot box as in his cot.No gaudy scars. the bumper knocked him clear.

A four-foot box, a foot for every year.

14

Blackbe17)r-Picking

for Philip Hobsbawn

Late August, given heavy rain and sunFor a full week, the blackberries would ripen.At first, just one, a glossy purple clotAmong others, red, green, hard as a knot.You ate that first one and its flesh was sweetLike thickened wine: summer's blood was in itLeaving stains upon the tongue and lust forPicking. Then red ones inked up and that hungerSent us out with milk cans, pea tins, jam potsWhere briars scratched and wet grass bleached our boots.Round hayfields, cornfields and potato drillsWe trekked and picked until the cans were full,Until the tinkling bottom had been coveredWith green ones, and on top big dark blobs burnedLike a prate of eyes. Our hands were pepperedWith thorn pricks, our palms sticky as Bluebeard's.

We hoarded the fresh berries in the byreBut when the bath was filled we found a fur,A rat-grey fungus, glutting on our cache.The juice was stinking too. Once off the bushThe fruit fermented, the sweet flesh would tum sour.I always felt like crying. It wasn't fairThat all the lovely canfuls smelt of rot.Each year I hoped they'd keep, knew they would not.

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Follower

My father worked with a horse-plough,His shoulders globed like a full sail strungBetween the shafts and the furrow.The horses strained at his clicking tongue.

An expert. He would set the wingAnd fit the bright steel-pointed sock.The sod rolled over without breaking.At the headrig, with a single pluck

Of reins, the sweating team turned roundAnd back into the land. His eyeNarrowed and angled at the ground,Mapping the furrow exactly.

I stumbled in his hobnailed wake,Fell sometimes on the polished sod;Sometimes he rode me on his backDipping and rising to his plod.

I wanted to grow up a.."ld plough,To close one eye, stiffen my arm.All I ever did was followIn his broad shadow round the farm.

I was a nuisance, tripping, falling,Yapping always. But todayIt is my father who keeps stumbling&ehind me, and will not go away.

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Bogland

for T. P. Flanagan

'Ve have no prairiesTo slice a big sun at eveningEverywhere the eye concedes toEncroaching horizon,

Is wooed into the cyclops' eyeOf a tam. Our unfenced countryIs bog that keeps crustingBetween the sights of the sun.

They've taken the skeletonOf the Great Irish ElkOut of the peat, set it up,An astounding crate full of air.

Butter sunk underMore than a hundred yearsWas recovered salty and white.The ground itself is kind, black butter

Melting and opening underfoot,Missing its last defmitionBy millions of years.They'll never dig coal here,

Only the waterlogged trunksOf great firs, soft as pulp.Our pioneers keep strikingInwards and downwards,

Every layer they stripSeems camped on before.The bogholes might be Atlantic seepage.The wet centre is bottomless.

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Anahorish

My 'place of clear water',the first hill in the worldwhere springs washed intothe shiny grass

and darkened cobblesin the bed of the lane.Anahorish, soft gradientof consonant, vowel-meadow,

; after-image of lamps! swung through the yards

on winter evenings.With pails and barrows

those mound-dwellersgo waist-deep in mistto break the light iceat wells and dunghills.

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The Tollund A1an

I

Some day I will go to AarhusTo see his peat-brown head,The mild pods of his eyelids,His pointed skin cap.

In the flat country nearbyWhere they dug him out,His last gruel of winter seedsCaked in his stomach,

Naked except forThe cap, noose and girdle,I will stand a long time.Bridegroom to the goddess,

She tightened her tore on himAnd opened her fen,Those dark juices workingHim to a saint's kept body,

Trove of the twf-cutters'Honeycombed workings.Now his stained faceReposes at Aarhus.

n

I could risk blasphemy,Consecrate the cauldron bogOur holy ground and prayHim to make germinate

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The scar..ered, ambushedFlesh of labourers,Stockinged corpsesLaid out in the farmyards,

Tell-tale skin and teethFlecking the sleepersOf four young brothers, trailedFor miles along the lines.

m

Something of his sad freedom.M. he rode the tumbrilShould come to me, driving,Saying the names

ToUund, Grauballe, Nebelgard.Watching the pointing bandsOf countrY people,Not knowing their tongue.

Out there in JutlandIn the old man-killing parishesI will feel lostl

Unhappy and at home.

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Mossbaw11.: Two Poems 1:11. Dedication

I. Sunlight

There was a sunlit absence.The helmeted pump in the yardheated its iron,water honeyed

in the slung bucketand the sun stoodlike a griddle coolingagainst the wall

of each long afternoon.So, her hands scuffiedover the hakeboard,the reddening stove

sent its plaque of heatagainst her where she stoodin a floury apronby the window.

Now she dusts the boardwith a goose's wing,now sits, broad-lapped,with whitened nails

and measling shins:here is a spaceagain, the scone risingto the tick of two clocks.

And here is lovelike a tinsmith's scoopsunk past its gleamin the meal-bin.

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IVorth

I returned to a long strand,the hammered curve of a bay,and found only the secularpowers of the Atlantic thundering.

I faced the unmagicalinvitations of Iceland,the pathetic coloniesof Greenland, and suddenly

those fabulous raiders,those lying in Orkney and Dublinmeasured againsttheir long swords rusting,

those in the solidbelly of stone ships,those hacked and glintingin the gravel of thawed streams

were ocean-deafened voiceswarning me, lifted againin violence and epiphany.The longship's swimming tongue

was buoyant with hindsightit said Thor's hammer swungto geography and trade,thick-witted couplings and revenges,

the hatreds and behind-backsof the althing, lies and women,exhaustions nominated peace,memory incubating the spilled blood.

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It said, 'Lie downin the word-hoard, burrowthe coil and gleamof your ftuTowed brain.

Compose in darkness.Expect aurora borealisin the long foraybut no cascade of light.

Keep your eye clearas the bleb of the icicle,trust the feel of what nubbed treasureyour hands have known.'

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Punishment

I can feel the tugof the halter at the napeof her neck, the windon her naked front.

It blows her nipplesto amber beads,it shakes the frail riggingof her ribs.

I can see her drownedbody in the bog,the weighing stone,the floating rods and boughs.

Under which at nrstshe was a barked saplingthat is dug upoak-bone, brain-nrkin:

her shaved headlike a stubble of black com,her blindfold a soiled bandage,her noose a ring

to storethe memories of love.Little adulteress,before they punished you

you were flaxen-haired,undernourished, and yourtar-black face was beautiful.My poor scapegoat,

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Act of Union

I

Tonight, a nrst movement, a pulse,As if the rain in bogland gathered headTo slip and flood: a bog-burst,A gash breaking open the femy bed.Your back is a nrm line of eastern coastAnd arms and legs are thrownBeyond your gradual hills. I caressThe heaving province where our past has grown.I am the tall kingdom over your shoulderThat you would neither cajole nor ignore.Conquest is a lie. I grow olderConceding your half-independent shoreWithin whose borders now my legacyCulminates inexorably.

n

And I am still imperiallyMale, leaving you with the pain,The rending process in the colony,The battering ram, the boom burst from within.The act sprouted an obstinate nfth columnWhose stance is growing unilateral.His heart beneath your heart is a wardrumMustering force. His parasiticalAnd ignorant little nsts alreadyBeat at your borders and I know they're cockedAt me across the water. No treatyI foresee will salve completely your trackedAnd stretehmarked body, the big painThat leaves you raw, like opened ground, again.

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Exposure

It is December in Wicklow:Alders dripping, birchesInheriting the last light,The ash tree cold to look at.

A comet that was lostShould be visible at sunset,Those million tons of lightLike a glimmer of haws and rose-hips,

And I sometimes see a falling star.If I could come on meteoritelInstead I walk through damp leaves,Husks, th,: spent flukes of autumn,

Imagining a heroOn some muddy compound.His gift like a slingstoneWhirled for the desperate.

How did I end up like this?I often think of my friends'Beautiful prismatic counsellingAnd the anvil brains of some who hate me

As I sit weighing and weighingMy responsible tristia.For what? For the ear? For the people?For what is said behind-backs?

Rain comes down through the alders,Its low conducive voicesMutter about let-downs and erosionsAnd yet each drop recalls

26

The diamond absolutes.I am neither internee nor informer;An inner emigre, grown long-haixedAnd thoughtful; a wood-keme

Escaped from the massacre,Taking protective colouringFrom bole and bark, feelingEvery wind that blows;

Who, blowing up these sparksFor their meagre heat, have missedThe once-in-a-lifetime ponent,The comet's pulsing rose.

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(,.l/),n mo<V SO(h,e..tIX

Outside the kitchen window a black ratSways on the briar like infected fruit:'It looked me through, it stared me out, I'm notImagining things. Go you out to it.'Did we come to the wilderness for this?We have our burnished bay tree at the gate,Classical, hung with the reek of silageFrom the next farm, tart-leafed as inwit.Blood on a pitchfork, blood on chaff and hay,Rats speared in the sweat and dust of threshingWhat is my apology for poetry?The empty briar is swishingWhen I come down, and beyond, inside, your faceHaunts like a new moon glimpsed through tangled glass.

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Villanelle for an Annive7-sal)'"

A spirit moved, John Harvard waUted the yard,The atom lay unsplit, the west unwon,The books stood open and the gates unbarred.

The maps dreamt on like moondust. Nothing stirred.The future was a verb in hibernation.A spirit moved, John Harvard walked the yard.

Before the classic style, before the clapboard,All through the small hours of an origin,The books stood open and the gates unbarred.

Night passage of a migratory bird.Wingflap. Gownflap. Like a homing pigeonA spirit moved, John Harvard waUted the yard.

Was that his soul (look) sped to its rewardBy grace or works? A shooting star? An omen?The books stood open and the gates unbarred.

Begin again where frosts and tests were hard.Find yourself or founder. Here, imagineA spirit moves, John Harvard walks the yard,The books stand open and the gates unbarred.

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Alphabets

I

A shadow his father makes with joined handsAnd thumbs and fingers nibbles on the wallLike a rabbit's head. He understandsHe will understand more when he goes to school.

There he draws smoke with chalk the whole first week,Then draws the forked stick that they call a Y.This is writing. A swan's neck and swan's backMake the z he can see now as well as say.

Two rafters and a cross-tie on the slateAre the letter some call ah, some call a)'.There are' charts, there are headlines. there is a rightWay to hold the pen and a wrong way.

First it is 'copying out', and then 'English',Marked correct with a little leaning hoe.Smells of inkwells rise in the classroom hush.A globe in the window tilts like a coloured O.

II

Declensions sang on air like a hosannaAs, column after stratified colwnn,Book One of Elementa Latina,Marbled and minatory, rose up in him.

For he was fostered next in a stricter schoolNamed for the patron saint of the oak woodWhere classes switched to the pealing of a bellAnd he left the Latin forum for the shade

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Of new calligraphy that felt like home.The letters of this alphabet were trees.The capitals were orchards in full bloom,The lines of script like briars coiled in ditches.

Here in her snooded garment and bare feet,All ringleted in assonance and woodnotes,The poet's dream stole over him like sunlightAnd passed into the tenebrous thickets.

He learns this other writing. He is the scribeWho drove a team of quills on his white field.Round his cell door the blackbirds dart and dab.Then self-denial, fasting, the pure cold.

By rules that hardened the farther they reached northHe bends to his desk and begins again.Christ's sickle has been in the undergrowth.The script grows bare and Merovingian.

ill

The globe has spun. He stands in a wooden O.He alludes to Shakespeare. He alludes to Graves.Time has bulldozed the school and school window.Balers drop bales like printouts where 'stooked sheaves

Made lambdas on the stubble once at harvestAnd the delta face of each potato pitWas patted straight and moulded against frost.All gone, with the omega that kept

Watch above each door, the good-luck horseshoe.Yet shape-note language, absolute on airAs Constantine's sky-lettered IN HOC SIGNO

Can still command him; or the necromancer

Who would hang from the domed ceiling of his houseA figure of the world with colours in it

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So that the figure of the universeAnd 'not just single things' would meet his sight

When he walked abroad. As from his small windowThe astronaut sees all that he bas sprung from,The risen, aqueous, singular, lucent 0Like a magnified and buoyant ovum-

Or like my own wide pre-reflective stareAll agog at the plasterer on his ladderSkimming our gable and writing our name thereWith his trowel point, letter by strange letter.

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The Haw Lantern

The wintry haw is burning out of season,crab of the thorn, a small light for small people,wanting no more from them but that they keepthe wick of self-respect from dying out,not having to blind them with illumination.

But sometimes when your breath plumes in the frostit takes the roaming shape of Diogeneswith his lantern, seeking one just man;so you end up scrutinized from behind the hawhe holds up at eye-level on its twig,

, and you flinch before its bonded pith and stone,its blood-prick that you wish would test and clear you,its pecke~-at ripeness that scans you, then moves on.

33

From the Republic ofConscience

'When I landed in the republic of conscienceit was so noiseless when the engines stoppedI could hear a curlew high above the runway.

At immigration, the clerk was an old manwho produced a wallet from his homespun coatand showed me a photograph of my grandfather.

The woman in customs asked me to declarethe words of our traditional cures and charmsto heal dumbness and avert the evil eye.

No porters. No interpreter. No taxi.You carried your own burden and very soonyour symptoms of creeping privilege disappeared.

II

Fog is a dreaded omen there but l\ghtningspells universal good and parents hangswaddled infants in trees during thunderstorms.

Salt is their precious mineral. And seashellsare held to the ear during births and funerals.The base of all inks and pigments is seawater.

• Their sacred symbol is a stylized boat.The sail is an ear, the mast a sloping pen,the hull a mouth-shape, the keel an open eye.

At their inauguration, public leadersmust swear to uphold unwritten law and weepto atone for their presumption to hold office-

34

and to aflirm their faith that all life sprangfrom salt in tears which the sky-god weptafter he dreamt his solitude was endless.

m

I came back from that frugal republicwith my two arms the one length, the customs womanhaving insisted my allowance was myself.

The old man rose and gazed into my faceand said that was official recognitionthat I was now a dual citizen.

He therefore desired me when I got hometo consider myself a representativeand to speak on their behalf in my own tongue.

Their emlJassies, he said, were everywherebut operated independentlyand no ambassador would ever be relieved.

35

L\ '-)\"I't-..:.n\ \"\~~viii

The annals say: when the monks of ClonmacnoiseWere all at prayers inside the oratoryA ship appeared above them in the air.

The anchor dragged along behind so deepIt hooked itself into the altar railsAnd then, as the big hull rocked to a standstill,

A crewman shinned and grappled down the ropeAnd struggled to release it. But in vain.'This man can't bear our life here and will drown,'

The abbot said, 'unless we help him.' SoThey did, the freed ship sailed, and the man climbed backOut of the marvellous as he had known it.

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VII. The Skylight

You were the one for skylights. I opposedCutting into the seasoned tongue-and-grooveOf pitch pine. I liked it low and closed)Its claustrophobic) nest-up-in-the.roofEffect. I liked the snuff-dry feeling)The perfect, trWlk-lid fit of the old ceiling.Under there) it was all hutch and hatch.The blue slates kept the heat like midnight thatch.

But when the slates came off) extravagantSky entered and held surprise wide open.For days I felt like an inhabitant

, Of that house where the man sick of the palsyWas lower.ed through the roof) had his sins forgiven)Was healed) took up his bed and walked away.

37

Derek Walcott was born in 1930 in the town of Castries in Saint Lucia, one of the Windward Islands in the Lesser Antilles. The experience of growing up on the isolated volcanic island, an ex-British colony, has had a strong influence on Walcott's life and work. Both his grandmothers were said to have been the descendants of slaves. His father, a Bohemian watercolourist, died when Derek and his twin brother, Roderick, were only a few years old. His mother ran the town's Methodist school. After studying

at St. Mary's College in his native island and at the University of the West Indies in Jamaica, Walcott moved in 1953 to Trinidad, where he has worked as theatre and art critic. At the age of 18, he made his debut with 25 Poems, but his breakthrough came with the collection of poems, In a Green Night (1962). In 1959, he founded the Trinidad Theatre Workshop which produced many of his early plays. Walcott has been an assiduous traveller to other countries but has always, not least in his efforts to create an indigenous drama, felt himself deeply-rooted in Caribbean society with its cultural fusion of African, Asiatic and European elements. For many years, he has divided his time between Trinidad, where he has his home as a writer, and Boston University, where he teaches literature and creative writing. From Nobel Lectures, Literature 1991-1995, Editor Sture Allén, World Scientific Publishing Co., Singapore, 1997

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A Single, Homeless, Circling Satellite: DerekWalcott, 1992 Nobel Literature Laureateby Jöran Mjöberg26 June 2001

Background and YouthBlack and White Ancestry

Derek Walcott was born in 1930 on St. Lucia, an island then belonging to the BritishEmpire, but which became independent in 1979. St. Lucia has a hybrid British/Frenchculture, having alternated as a colony of either England or France across the centuries.Walcott's ancestry is also mixed, with both his maternal and paternal grandmothers beingblack. His mother was a respected teacher at a Methodist infant school while his father diedwhen Derek was only one year old.

St. Lucia became independent in 1979, but maintains its hybridBritish and French culture to this day.

The Young Painter

His civil servant father had been an amateur painter, and the son has also devoted much ofhis grown-up life to painting, not to mention the many references to the great names in artall through his literary works. When growing up in Castries, the capital of St. Lucia, youngWalcott attended St. Mary's College where his most important mentor was a painter, HaroldSimmons. He soon took an interest in great European artists like Cézanne, Gauguin, andvan Gogh.

A 1969 photo of Derek Walcott painting in Trinidad (left) and aself-portrait (oil on canvas) done in 1998.Photo by Peter Ireson

Published Poet at 14, Dramatist at 16

While the town of Castries had an Europeanized culture, Afro-Caribbean folk customs and

A Single, Homeless, Circling Satellite: Derek Walcott, 1992 Nob... http://nobelprize.org/cgi-bin/print?from=%2Fnobel_prizes%2Fli...

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traditions dominated the countryside of St. Lucia. Walcott published his first poem when hewas just fourteen. At sixteen he wrote five plays and had his first collection of poetrypublished. By the age of twenty, Walcott was ready to found a theatre company on his own,the ST. LUCIA ARTS GUILD. In its inaugural year, this company produced his play Henri-Christophe, whose subject was taken from the colonial history of another Caribbean island,namely Haiti.

At 16, Walcott wrote fiveplays.Copyright © The Bruce KingCollection

Academic Studies

After graduating from St. Mary's College, Walcott continued his studies in another part ofthe Caribbean, on the island of Jamaica, where he attended the University College of theWest Indies at Mona. Here he obtained his bachelor's degree in 1953. At the UniversityCollege, he was both the editor of the student magazine and the president of MONADRAMATIC SOCIETY.

The Search for an IdentityA central theme that runs throughout Walcott's works is his search for identity. From thebeginning, he has intensely felt the antagonisms between the cultural heritage of the OldWorld and the traditions of the new one. In his critical work Derek Walcott, published in1999, John Thieme describes the conflicts Walcott has experienced between the positions ofEuropean and African, Anglophone and Francophone, Standard English and Creole, andMethodist and Catholic. In the earlier collections of poetry, Thieme traces "a sense of lostperfection, cracked innocence and psychic fragmentation," which he considers to be a resultof the racial divisions of the Caribbean society. In one volume after another, by means of avariety of important poems, Walcott tries to find expressions for the difficulties inherent inCaribbean identity. In "A Far Cry from Africa" (1962) he depicts his desperate dilemma inrather brutal formulations:

The gorilla wrestles with the superman.I who am poisoned by the blood of both,Where shall I turn, divided to the vein?

Yet, in his fascinating essay of 1970, "What the Twilight Says," where he delivers a reportabout the origin of his interest in the theatre, he sounds more optimistic, hoping to be ableto make creative use of his cultural schizophrenia.

In the poem "The Schooner Flight" (1979), Shabine, a Walcott persona, gives an oftenquoted definition of the identity of a person from a small country in the Caribbean:

I have Dutch, nigger, and English in me,and either I am nobody, or I am a nation

In reality, this meant:

I had no nation now but the imagination

In a somewhat later work, "North and South" (1981), this poem's persona gives anothereffort to express an identity, referring to himself as

a colonial upstart at the end of an empire,a single, homeless, circling satellite

At an early stage, Walcott was seized by an interest in the situation of St. Lucia. This grewinto a promise to chronicle his island, a vow taken together with a painter friend. Walcott'searly play, Henri-Christophe, was connected with this intense desire to depict and expressthe essence of his Caribbean surroundings.

In a later context, Walcott managed with deeper penetration than ever before to give formto a mature attitude to this theme, with a kind of acceptance of the trespasses of his


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ancestors through the centuries. Here follows the end and epitome of his extremelyinteresting essay "The Muse of History," published in 1976 and re-published in 1998 in theessays with the title "What the Twilight Says":

I accept this archipelago of the Americas, I say to the ancestor who sold me, and to theancestor who bought me, I have no father, I want no such father, although I canunderstand you, black ghost, white ghost, when you both whisper "history," for if I attemptto forgive you both I am falling into your idea of history which justifies and explains andexpiates, and it is not mine to forgive, my memory cannot summon any filial love, sinceyour features are anonymous and erased and I have no wish and no power to pardon. Youwere when you acted your roles, your given, historical roles of slave seller and slave buyer,men acting as men, and also you, father in the filth-ridden gut of the slave ship, to you theywere also men, your fellowman and tribesman not moved or hovering with hesitation aboutyour common race any longer than my other bastard ancestor hovered with his whip, butto you, inwardly forgiven grandfathers, I, like the more honest of my race, give a strangethanks.

These are moving words for a person who feels himself exiled from the Eden of hisgrandfathers. We may be sure that this reconciliation has cost Walcott much but providedhim with deep inner peace. But if we think of its universal consequences, this does notmean that there should exist any universal forgiveness for brutality. Thus, Walcott has noforgiveness when he asks in Omeros whether he might have broken his pen when hestarted writing poetry forty years earlier, if he had realized that

this century's pastorals were being writtenby the chimneys of Dachau, of Auschwitz, of Sachsenhausen

Fascinated by the thoughts of explorers.Copyright © Anders Hallengren 2000Photo: Anders Hallengren

Explorers

Walcott is also fascinated by thoughts of the first men to discover and visit the world towhich he belongs. These were explorers like Columbus, Walter Raleigh, and James Cook, aswell as rebels like Toussaint and Henri-Christophe. To Walcott, Robinson Crusoe, more thananybody else, is a real archetype, and his long poem, "Crusoe's Island" (published in the1965 volume The Castaway), contains in addition to a detailed geographic andpsychological characterization, simple, lucid lines like the following ones:

Upon this rock the bearded hermit builtHis Eden:Goats, corn crop, fort, parasol, garden,Bible for Sabbath, all the joysBut oneWhich sent him howling for a human voice.Exiled by a flaming sunThe rotting nut, bowled in the surf,Became his own brain rotting from the guiltOf heaven without his kind,Crazed by such paradisal calmThe spinal shadow of a palmBuilt keel and gunwale in his mind.

In the 1978 play Pantomime, Walcott used only two characters, Robinson and Friday, in anironic, modernized variation of their personal relationship that takes place on the island ofTobago. In his important, autobiographical collection of poetry, Another Life, 1973, he alsospeaks about the task of those who first came over the seas to inhabit the American world:

We were blest with a virginal, unpainted worldwith Adam's task of giving things their names

An important part of Walcott's poetry and drama has as a partly subconscious program, the"Caribbeanization" of earlier, European motives. Thus, when he studies and admires theplays of John Synge and his depiction of Aran fishermen, as well as the filmatic work of theJapanese director Akira Kurosawa, he works by creating St. Lucian counterparts, simplefishermen speaking their patois.


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"Preparing the Net," 1999, oil on canvas byDerek Walcott.Copyright © Derek Walcott

The Dramatic WorkWalcott's dramatic work is as important as his poetry. Today, he has written abouttwenty-five plays, although not all of them have been published. He has defined himself as"not only a playwright but a company," the reason being that he has worked as much as aninstructor and as founder of theatre companies as a playwright. After starting "St. LuciaArts Guild" in 1950, he opened "Little Carib Theatre Workshop" in 1961. He had then hireda small troop of part-time actors, who could survive because they had other part-timeoccupations besides. They were nevertheless working under unsure economic conditions,with occasional contributions from the Rockefeller Foundation. In 1966, Walcott's companychanged its name to "Trinidad Theatre Workshop". As its success gradually grew, the newcompany made guest performances abroad - in Jamaica, Guyana, Toronto (Canada),Boston, and New York (the USA). Walcott himself has worked at different places teaching,including Boston University as a professor of drama.

Among Walcott's earlier plays, Ti-Jean and his Brothers has a background in Caribbeanfolklore, while Dream on Monkey Mountain, his dramatic masterpiece, takes place on hisown island of St. Lucia. The latter work's social inspiration derives from Jean-Paul Sartre'stheories about the black Orpheus, as well as from Frantz Fanon, the French sociologist whoimpressed the peoples of the Western colonies so deeply with his work Les Damnés de laTerre (1956).

Dream on Monkey Mountain

The Dream on Monkey Mountain (1967) belongs to the twentieth-century genre calleddream plays, connected with works by playwrights such as Strindberg as well as by Syngeand Soyinka. The play's main character is Makak (French patois for "Ape"), a blackcharcoal-burner who comes to town, gets drunk, and is taken into custody by CorporalLestrade, a mulatto guard who is the maintainer of law and order during the later years ofthe colonial power. In a dream scene of a mock trial that was probably inspired by Kafkaand Hesse, Lestrade accuses Makak of being intoxicated and damaging the premises of alocal salesman. However, in another vivid dream sequence, Makak is crowned king in theromantic Africa of his roots, surrounded by his wives, his warriors, and the masks of pagangods.

In a second mock trial, a number of great Western characters (e.g., Plato, Ptolemy, Dante,Cecil Rhodes, Florence Nightingale) are accused of neglecting other races and sentenced todeath by the African tribes. Lestrade has now given up his confession to the Western world,shouldered his black inheritance, and sworn allegiance to Makak. The poor charcoal-burneris acquitted from the charges, and able to withdraw to his West Indian world with adeepened sense of identity.

The dream visions in this play seem to belong both to Makak and to the collectiveatmosphere of the plot. Ironic effects appear throughout the events. At the same time asMakak's romantic dream of Africa is presented, he cherishes a fantasy of a whiteprotectress who takes care of him. But, as suggested by Lestrade, he gives up this dream,brutally beheading the woman with an African sword. This is a sacrifice that expresses asound reaction against a fantasy life alienated from reality. Makak's character also bearssymbolic similarities with Christ: in prison, he is followed by two robbers, and from GoodFriday he is able to look forward to the moment of resurrection on Easter Sunday. Theprison can be understood as a symbol both of life itself and of colonial rule. In asophisticated way, this play expresses central components of Walcott's attitude to thepolitical, racial, and psychological problems in his post-colonial world.

In Dream on Monkey Mountain, Walcott makes a great effort to interpret the nature ofCaribbean identity. Colonialism has been important in damaging the human soul andhumiliating the inhabitants of this part of the world. But there is no point trying to buildcastles in the air, as when Makak dreams of his African roots. At the end, in the epilogue,this simple-hearted visionary proletarian is acquitted, while Western civilization with itsgreat characters is sentenced to death. Regardless of this, hate and revenge are negligible -in fact, negative - factors to the writer Walcott.


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From Seville to Babylon

By Ti-Jean and His Brothers (1958), Walcott had more seriously started to embrace songand dance in the plot. He had been very successful with his first musicals, The Joker ofSeville (1974) and O Babylon (1976). The former is a re-working of Tirso de Molina's play Elburlador de Sevilla, and deals with the Don Juan character and its sexual and moralaspects, while at the same time taking up folk traditions and folk music (calypso) fromTrinidad. O Babylon goes back to Walcott's experiences in Jamaica and deals with theopinions of a religious and political sect of this island, the Rastafarians, and their rejectionof Western culture. In Dream on Monkey Mountain, the dances, the miming, and themasquerades take on an even wider role.

A poster done by Derek Walcott for theplay "O Babylon".Copyright © Derek Walccot

The "Homeric" WorksOmerosFrom his early youth, Walcott had a great interest in both the sea and the Homeric world,calling the latter "an echo in the throat." Comparatively recently, he devoted two works tothis subject: Omeros (1990) and The Odyssey - A Stage Version (1993). Omeros is a workdivided into one hundred and ninety-two songs, written in a rhythmic blank verse with arichness of poetic metaphors and similes. In the French title, Walcott makes poetic pun inthat mer evokes the sense of both "sea" and "mother," and "o" signifies the sound blownthrough a conch from the sea. This great work presents a reversible world, a colonial orpost-colonial model corresponding to the original Homeric world. This is an epic poetic tale,with a multitude of different short stories, flashbacks, conversations, monologues,episodes, descriptions, and impressions, depicting in a minutely detailed way the Caribbeanworld and all its everyday life, its human beings, animals, nature, waters, and woods.

The book cover of "Omeros", using the painting done by DerekWalcott (right).Copyright © 1990 Farrar, Straus and Giroux

In Omeros, Homer himself appears in a row of different shapes. He is the blind Greek poethimself, the blind popular poet Seven Seas, the African griot or rhapsodist, the famousAmerican painter Winslow H o m e r (with his paintings from the Atlantic Ocean), Virgil (theRoman counterpart to the Greek poet), and a blind barge-man who turns up on the stairs ofthe London church St. Martin-in-the-Fields with a manuscript refused by the editors. Eventhe personalities correspond to the Homeric ones: Philoctete, the wounded archer; MajorPlunkett, a contemporary Philoctete; Achilles, here the son of an African slave; Hector, afisherman; Helen, intentionally made into a very commonplace and approachable youngCaribbean woman. Walcott's post-colonial world, a world where many slaves had classicGreek names, in many different ways corresponds to Rome and Greece. How could thepoet, he says, while listening to the quarrel of two fishermen in his hometown, avoidthinking of quarreling Homeric characters?

Walcott's text is crowded with thoughts and reflections on history: "the farthest


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exclamations of history are written by a flag of smoke," exemplified by Troy, Carthage,Pompeii; "art is history's nostalgia," implying that literature carries the same guilt ashistory and history is midden built on midden. Likewise, as a background to the life ofpeople in our time, Walcott refers to violent events in history: the siege of Troy, theextermination of the Aruac people in the Caribbean by conquistadors, the eighteenth-century fights in the Caribbean between the English and French navies, as well as theprolonged catastrophe that extinguished most native Americans. Or the cruel attacks onAfrican villages by slave traders, the perpetual tragedy of the captives who had to leavetheir homes, their families, their professions, and their tools, to try to create a new identitybeyond the Atlantic; Ibos, Guineans, and many others.

"Domino Players", (gouache on paper), done by DerekWalcott in 1999.Copyright © Derek Walcott

The OdysseyIn a similar manner, the theatre production The Odyssey testifies to Walcott's deep interest,or rather involvement, in the Homeric world. There are, indeed, similarities betweenOmeros and The Odyssey, but there are also major differences. As a dramatic work, TheOdyssey is divided into two acts, the first with fourteen scenes, the second with six. Thespeeches are short, usually only one line each, with the exception of the songs sung by theblind Billy Blue, who is a more modern version of Homer. Now and then, in a number oflines, the speeches have endings that form natural rhymes. The characters are well-knownfrom Homer and include Penelope, Odysseus' wife, who has to wait for his return from Troyfor twenty years; Telemachus, his son; his old nurse on Ithaca, Eurycleia, who is the first torecognize him when he comes back at last from his many adventures; and Eumaeus, theshepherd. There are also the kings visited by Telemachus when he seeks his father: Nestorof Pylos and Menelaos of Sparta. We meet with the sailors of Odysseus' ship; King Alcinousand his daughter Nausicaa on the isle of the Phaeacians; Cyclops, the dangerous giant;Circe, the seductress; and in a short scene, corresponding to the sixth song of Homer'swork, Odysseus' own mother Anticlea in the Underworld.

This does not mean, however, that all these characters are copies of those in the GreekOdyssey. Walcott is strikingly independent in forming different personalities. This work isnot characterized by the same breadth and depth of the descriptions as in Omeros, but itsdramatic verve, its liveliness, and its exquisite sense of humor distinguish it. We mayaccompany Odysseus from the victory at Troy, over his different stations on his way home,as well as we become more closely acquainted with Telemachus on his different expeditionsand with Penelope in her difficult position in Ithaca. And the final scenes where Odysseuscomes home and is at last recognized by Penelope and Telemachus do not lose any of thethrilling effects connected with the original Homeric situation. With its light, witty dialogue,it is in some ways more accessible than its poetic relative. Together, these two worksprovide some idea of Walcott's rich cultural and political outlook over the seas andcontinents of the human world.


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Prelude

I, with legs crossed along the daylight, watchThe variegated fists ofclouds that gather overThe uncouth features of this, my prone island.

Meanwhile the steamers which divide horizons proveUs lost;Found onlyIn tourist booklets, behind ardent binoculars;Found in the blue reflection of eyesThat have known cities and think us here happy.

Time creeps over the patient who are too long patient,So I, who have made one choice,Discover that my boyhood has gone over.

And my life, too early ofcourse for the profound cigarette,The turned doorhandle, the knife turningIn the bowels of the hours, must not be made publicUntil I have learnt to sufferIn accurate iambics.

I go, ofcourse, through all the isolated acts,Make a holiday ofsituations,Straighten my tie and fIX important jaws,And note the living imagesOf flesh that saunter through the eye.

Until from all I tum to think how,In the middle of the journey through my life,o how I came upon you, myReluctant leopard of the slow eyes.

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A Far Cry From Africa

A wind is ruffling the tawny peltOfAfrica. Kikuyu, quick as fliesBatten upon the bloodstreams of the veldt.Corpses are scattered through a paradise.But still the worm, colonel of carrion, cries:Waste no compassion on these separate dead'Statistics justify and scholars seizeThe salients of colonial policy.What is that to the white child hacked in bed?To savages, expendable as Jews?

Threshed out by beaters, the long rushes breakIn a white dust of ibises whose criesHave wheeled since civilization's dawnFrom the parched river or beast-teeming plain;The violence ofbeast on beast is readAs natural law, but upright manSeeks his divinity by inflicting pain.Delirious as these worried beasts, his warsDance to the tightened carcass of a drum,While he calls courage still, that native dreadOf the white peace contracted by the dead.

Again brutish necessity wipes its handsUpon the napkin of a dirty cause, againA waste of our compassion, as with Spain.The gorilla wrestles with the superman.

I who am poisoned with the blood ofboth,Where shall I turn, divided to the vein?I who have cursedThe drunken officer of British rule, how chooseBetween this Mrica and the English tongue I love?Betray them both, or give back what they give?How can I face such slaughter and be cool?How can I turn from Africa and live?

46

A City's Death By Fire

After that hot gospeller has levelled all but the churched sky,I wrote the tale by tallow ofa city's death by fire;Under a candle's eye, that smoked in tears, IWanted 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 balesTom open by looting, and white, in spite of the fire.By the smoking sea, where Christ walked, I asked, whyShould 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 leafwas a green breathRebuilding a love I thought was dead as nails,Blessing the death and the baptism by fire.

47

Parang

Man, I suck me tooth when I hearHow dem croptime fiddlers lie,And de wailing, kiss-me-arse flutesThat bring water to me eye!Oh, when I t'ink how from youngI wasted time at de fetes,I could bawl in a red-eyed rageFor desire turned to regret,Not knowing the truth that I sangAt parang and la commette.Boy, every damned tune them tuneOf love that go last foreverIs the wax and the wane of the moonSince Adam catch body-fever.

laid, so the young crop won'tHave these claws to reap their waist,But I know "do more" from "don't"Since the grave cry out "Make haste!"This banjo world have one stringAnd all man does dance to that tune:That love is a place in the bushWith music grieving from far,As you look past her shoulder and seeLike her one tear afterwards

The falling of a fixed star.Young men does bring love to disgraceWith remorseful, regretful words,When flesh upon flesh was the tuneSince the first cloud raise up to discloseThe breast of the naked moon.

48

A Letterfrom Brooklyn

An old lady writes me in a spidery style,Each character trembling, and I see a veined handPellucid as paper, travelling on a skeinOf such frail thoughts its thread is often broken;Or else the filament from which a phrase is hungDims to my sense, but caught, it shines like steel,As touch a line and the whole web will feel.She describes my father, yet I forget her t1ce:More easily than my father's yearly dying;Of her I remember small, buttoned boots and the placeShe kept in our wooden church on those SundaysWhenever her strength allowed;Grey-haired, thin-voiced, perpetually bowed.

"I am Mable Rawlins," she writes, "and know both your parents";He is dead, Miss Rawlins, but God bless your tense:"Your father was a dutiful, honest,Faithful, and useful person."For such plain praise what fame is recompense?"A horn-painter, he painted delicately on horn,He used to sit around the table and paint pictures."The peace of God needs nothing to adornIt, nor glory nor ambition."He is twenty-eight years buried," she writes, "he was called home,And is, I am sure, doing greater work."

The strength ofone frail hand in a dim roomSomewhere in Brooklyn, patient and assured,Restores my sacred duty to the Word."I-lome, home," she can write, with such short time to live,Alone as she spins the blessings of her years;Not withered of beauty if she can bring such tears,Nor withdrawn from the world that breaks its lovers so;Heaven is to her the place where painters go,All who bring beauty on frail shell or horn,There was all made, thence their lux-mundi drawn,Drawn, drawn, till the thread is resilient steel,Lost though it seems in darkening periods,And there they return to do work that is God's.

So this old lady writes, and again I believe.I believe it all, and for no man's death I grieve.

49

Codicil

Schizophrenic, wrenched by two styles,one a hack's hired prose, I earnmy exile. I trudge this sickle, moonlit beach for miles,

tan,bumto slough offthis love of ocean that's sell-love.

To change your language you must change your life.

I cannot right old wrongs.Waves tire of horizon and return.Gulls screech with rusty tongues

Above the beached, rotting pirogues,they were a venomous beaked cloud at Charlotteville.

Once I thought love of country was enough,now, even if I chose, there's no room at the trough.

I watch the best minds root like dogsfor scraps of favour.I am nearing middleage, burnt skinpeels from my hand like paper, onion-thin,like Peer Gynt's riddle.

At heart there's nothing, not the dreadof death. I know too many dead.They're all familiar, all in character,

even how they died. On fire,the flesh no longer fears that furnace mouthof earth,

that kiln or ashpit of the sun,nor this clouding, unclouding sickle moonwhitening this beach again like a blank page.

All its indifference is a different rage.

50

Crusoe's Island

I

The chapel's cowbellLike God's anvilHammers ocean to a blinding shield;Fired, the sea grapes slowly yieldBronze plates to the metallic heat.

Red, corrugated-ironRoofs roar in ~e sun.The wiry, ribbed airAbove earth's open kilnWrithes like a child's visionOf hell, but nearer, nearer.

Below, the picnic plaidOf Scarborough is spreadTo a blue, perfect sky,Dome of our hedonist philosophy.Bethel and Canaan's heartLies open like a psalm.I labour at my art.My father, God, is dead.

Past thirty now I knowTo love the self is dreadOf being swallowed by the blueOf heaven overheadOr rougher blue below.Some lesion of the brainFrom art or alcoholFlashes this fear by day:As startling as his shadowGrows to the castaway.

Upon this rock the bearded hennit builtHis Eden:Goats, com crop, fort, parasol, garden,Bible for Sabbath, all the joysBut oneWhich sent him howling for a human voice.Exiled by a flaming sunThe rotting nut, bowled in the surf,Became his own brain rotting from the guiltOf heaven without his kind,Crazed by such paradisal calmThe spinal shadow of a palmBuilt keel and gunwale in his mind.

51

The second Adam since the fall,His germinalCorruption held the seedOf that congenital heresy that men failAccording to their creed.Craftsman and castaway,All heaven in his head,He watched his shadow prayNot for God's love but human love instead.

II

We came here for the cureOf quiet in the whelk's centre,From the fierce, sudden quarrel,From kitchens where the mind,Like bread, disintegrates in water,To let a salt sun scourThe brain as harsh as coral,To bathe like stones in wind,To be, like beast or natural object, pure.

That fabled, occupationalComp~ssion,supposedly inherited with the giftOf poetry, had fedWith a rat's thrift on faith, shiftedIts trust to comers, hoardedIts mania like bread,Its brain a white, nocturnal bloomThat in a drunken, moonlit roomSaw my son's headSwaddled in sheetsLike a lopped nut, lolling in foam.

o love, we die aloneII am borne by the bellBackward to boyhoodTo the grey woodSpire, harvest and marigold,

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To those whom a cruelJust God could gatherTo His blue breast, His beardA folding cloud,As He gathered my father.Irresolute and proud,I can never go back.

I have lost sight of hell,Of heaven, of human will,My skillIs not enough,I am struck by this bellTo the root.Crazed by a racking sun,I stand at my life's noon,On parched, delirious sandMy shadow lengthens.

III

Art is profane and pagan,The most it has revealedIs what a crippled VulcanBeat on Achilles' shield.By these blue, changing gravesFanned by the furnace blastOf heaven, may the mindCatch fire till it cleavesIts mould of clay at last.

Now Friday's progeny,The brood of Crusoe's slave,Black little girls in pinkOrgandy, crinolines,Walk in their air of gloryBeside a breaking wave;Below their feet the surfHisses like tambourines.

At dusk, when they returnFor vespers, every dressTouched by the sun will bumA seraph's, an angers,And nothing I can learnFrom art or lonelinessCan bless them as the bell'sTransfiguring tongue can bless.

53

IvI issing the Sea

Something removed roars in the ears of this house,Hangs its drapes windless, stuns mirrorsTill reflections lack substance.

Some sound like the gnashing of vvindmills groundTo a dead halt;Adeafening absence, a blow.

It hoops this valley, weighs this mountain,Estrang~s gesture. pushes this pencilThrough a thick nothing now.

Freights cupboards with silence, folds sour laundryLike the clothes of the dead left exactlyAs the dead behaved by the beloved.

Incredulous. e~..pecting occupancy.

54

A Map of Europe

Like Leonardo's ideaWhere landscapes open on a waterdropOr dragons crouch in stains,My flaking wall, in the bright air.Maps Europe with its veins.

On its limned window ledgeAbeer can's gilded rim gleams likeEvening along a Canaletto lake,Or like .that rocky hermitageWhere, in his cell of light, haggard JeromePrays that His kingdom comeTo the far city.

The light creates its stillness. In its ringEverything IS. Acracked coHee cup,A broken loaf, a dented urn becomeThemselves, as in Chardin,Or in beer-brightVermeer,Not objects of our pity.

In it is no 1acrimae rerum.No art. Only the giftTo see things as they are, halved by a darknessFrom which they cannot shift.

55

Blues

Those five or six young guyshunched on the stoopthat oven-hot summer nightwhistled me over. Niceand friendly. So, I stop.MacDougal or ChristopherStreet in chains oflight.

A summer festival. Or somesaint's. I wasn't too far fromhome, but not too brightfor a nigger, and not too dark.I figured we were allone, wop, nigger, jew,besides, this wasn't Central Park.I'm corning on too strong? You figureright! They beat this yellow niggerblack and blue.

Yeah. During all this, scaredon case one used a knife,I hung my olive-green, just-boughtsports coat on a fire plug.I did nothing. They foughteach other, really. Lifegives them a few kcks,that's all. The spades, the spicks.

My face smashed in, my bloddy mugpouring, my olive-branch jacket savedfrom cuts and tears,I crawled four flights upstairs.Sprawled in the gutter, Iremember a few watchers wavedloudly, and one kid's mother shoutinglike "Jackie" or "Terry:'" I' I I"now t lat s enoug 1.

It's nothing really.They don't get enough love.

You know they wouldn't killyou. Just playing rough,like young Americans will.Still it taught me somethingabout love. If it's so tough,forget it.

56

Midsumme1', Tobago

Broad sun-stoned beaches.

White heat.A green river.

A bridge,scorched yellow palms

from the summer-sleeping housedrowsing thFough August.

Days I have held,days I have lost,

days that outgrow, like daughters,my harbouring arms.

57

Sea Canes

Half my friends are dead.I will make you new ODes, said earth.No, give me them back, as they were, instead,with faults and aU, I cried.

TOnight I can snatch their talkfrom the faint surfs dronethrough the canes, but I cannot walk

on the moonlit leaves of oceandown that white road alone,or Hoat with the dreaming motion

of owls leaving earth's load.o earth, the number of friends you keepexceeds those left to be loved.

The sea canes by the cliff :Bash green and silver;they were the seraph lances of my faith,but out of what is lost grows something stronger

that has the rational radiance of stone,enduringmoonlight, further than despair,stroDR as the wind, that through dividing canes

brings those we love before us, as they were,with faults and all, not nobler, just there.

58

Sea Grapes

That sail which leans on light,• tired of islands,

a schooner beating up the Calibbean

for home, could be Odysseus,home-bound on the Aegean;that father and husband's

longing, under gnarled sour grapes, islike the adulterer hearing Nausicaa's namein every gull's outcry. .

...

This brings nobody peace. The ancient warbetween obsession and responsibilitywill never finish and has been the same

for the sea-wanderer or the one on shorenow wriggling on his sandals to walk home,since Troy Sighed its last flame,

and the bUnd giant's boulder heaved the troughfrom whose groundsweU the great hexameters cometo the conclusions of exhausted surf.

The classics can console. But not enough.

59

Old New England

Black dippers, tarred with whales' blood, fold their sailsentering New Bedford, New London, New Haven.A white church spire whistles into spacelike a swordfish, a rocket pierces heavenas the thawed springs in icy chevrons racedown hillsides and Old Glories Bailthe crosses of green farm boys back from 'Nam.Seasons are measured still by the samespan of the veined leaf and the veined bodywhenever the spring wind startles an uproarof marching oaks with memories of a warthat peeled whole counties from the calendar.

The hillside is still wounded by the spireof the white meetinghouse, the Indian trailtrickles down it like the brown blood of the whalein rowanberries bubbling like the spooron logs burnt black as Bibles by hellfire.The war whoop is coiled tight in the white owl,stone-feathered icon of the Indian soul,and railway lines are arrowing to the farmountainwide absence of the Iroquois.~pring lances wood and wound, and a spring nmsdown tilted birch floors with their splintered sunsof beads and mirrors-broken promisesthat helped make this Republic what it is.

The crest of our conviction grows as loudas the spring oaks, rooted and reassuredthat God is meek but keeps a whistling sword;His harpoon is the white lance of the church,His wandering mind a trail folded in birch,His rage the vats that boiled the melted beastwhen the black clippers brought (knotting each shroudround the crosstrees ) our sons home from the East

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North and South

Now, at the rising of Venus-the steady starthat survives translation, if one can call this lampthe planet that pierces us over indigo islandsdespite the critical sand flies, I accept my functionas a colonial upstart at the end of an empire,a single, circling, homeless satellite.I can listen to its guttural death rattle in the shoalof the legions' withdrawing roar, from the raj,from the Reich, and see the full moon againlike a white flag rising over Fort Charlotte,and sunset slowly collapsing like the Hag.

It's good that everything's gone, except their language,which is everything. And it may be a childish revengeat the presumption of empires to hear the wormgnawing their solemn columns into coral,to snorkel over Atlantis, to see, through a mask,Sidon up to its windows in sand, Tyre, Alexandria,with their wavering seaweed spires through a glass-bottom boat,and to buy porous fragments of the Parthenonfrom a fisherman in Tobago, but the fear exists,Delenda est Carthago on the rose horizon,

and the side streets of Manhattan are sown with salt,as those in the North all wait for that white glareof the white rose of inferno, all the world's capitals.Here, in Manhattan, I lead a tight lifeand a cold one, my soles stiffen with iceeven through woollen socks; in the fenced back yard,trees with clenched teeth endure the wind of February,and I have some friends under its iron ground.Even when spring comes with its rain of nails,with its soiled ice oozing into black puddles,the world will be one season older but no wiser.

Fragments of paper swirl round the bronze generalof Sheridan Square, syllables of Nordic tongues(as an obeah priestess sprinkles Bour on the doorstepto ward off evil, so Carthage was sown with salt) ;the Bakes are falling like a common languageon my nose and lips, and rime forms on the mouthof a shivering exile from his African province;a blizzard of moths whirls around the extinguished lampof the Union general, sugary insects crunched underfoot.

61

You move alonO' dark afternoons where deaLhoentered a taxi and sat next to a friend,or passed another a razor, or Whispered "Pardon"in a check-clothed restaurant behind her cough"f am thinldn a of an exile farther than any country.~ ~

And in this heart of darkness, I cannot believe,they are now talking over palings by the dodderingbanana fences, or that seas can be warm.

How far I am from those cacophonous seaportsbuilt round the single exclamation of one statuteof Victoria Regina! There vultures shift on the roof

of the red iron market, whose patoisis brittle as slate, a grey stone flecked with quartz.I prefer the salt freshness of that ignorance,as language crusts and blackens on the potsof this cooked culture, coming from a raw one;and these days in bookstores I stand paralyzed

by the rows of shelves along whose wooden branchesthe free-verse nightingales are trilling "Read me! Read me'"in various metres of asthmatic pain;or I shiver before the bellowing behemothswith the snow still falling in white words on Eighth Street,those burly minds that barrelled through contradictionslike a boar through bracken, or an old tarponbristling with broken hooks, or an old stagspanielled by critics to a crag at twilight,

the exclamation of its antlers like a hat rackon which they hang their theses. I am tired of words,and literature is an old couch stuffed with fleas,of culture stuffed in the taxidermist's hides.I think of Europe as a gutter of autumn leaveschoked like the thoughts in an old woman's throat.But she was home to some consul in snow-white ducksdoing out his service in the African provinces,who wrote letters like this one home and feared malariaas I mistrust the dark snow, who saw the lances of rain

marching like a Roman legion over the fens.So, once again, when life has turned into exile,and nothing consoles, not books, work, music, or a woman,and I am tired of trampling the brown grass,

62

whose name I don't knG\v, do'-,,-;! an alley of stone,and I must tum back to the road, its winter traffic,and others sure in the dark of their direction,I lie under a blanket on a cold couch,feeling the flu in my bones'Iike a hl.l1tern.

Under the blue sky of winter in Virginiathe brick chimneys flute white smoke through skeletal lindens,as a spaniel churns up a pyre of blood-rusted leaves;there is no memorial here to their Treblinka-as a van delivers from the ovens loavesas warm as flesh, its brakes jaggedly screechlike the square wheel of a swastika. The maniaof history veils even the clearest air,the sickly sweet taste of ash, of something burn~g

And when one encounters the slow coil of an accent,reflexes step aside as if for a snake,with the paranoid anxiety of the victim.The ghosts of white-robed horsemen float through the trees,the galloping hysterical abhorrence of my race-like any child of the Diaspora, I remember thiseven as the flakes whiten Sheridan's shoulders,and I remember once looking at my aunt's face,the wintry blue eyes, the rusty hair, and thinking

maybe we are part Jewish, and felt a veinnm through this earth and clench itself like a fistaround an ancient root, and wanted the privilegeto be yet another of the races they fear and hateinstead of one of the haters and the afraid.Above the spiny woods, dun grass, skeletal trees,the chimney serenely Huting something from Schubert-

. like the wraith of smoke that comes from someone burningveins the air with an outcry that I cannot help.

The winter branches are mined with buds,the fields of March will detonate the crocus,the olive battalions of the summer woodswill shout orders back to the wind. To the soldier's mindthe season's passage round the pole is martial,the massacres of autumn sheeted in snow, aswinter turns white as a veterans hospital.Something quivers in the blood beyond controlsomething deeper than our transient fevers.

But in Virginia's woods there is also an old mandressed like a tramp in an old Union greatcoat,walking to the music of rustling leaves, and whenI collect my change from a small-town pharmacy,the cashier's fingertips still wince from my handas if it would singe hers-well, yes, fe suis un singe,I am one of that tribe of frenetic or melancholy~rima~~s.who.made your music for many more moons

63

Upstate

A knife blade of cold air keeps pryingthe bus window open. The spring countrywon't be shut out. The door to the johnkeeps banging. There're a few of us:a stale-drunk or stoned woman in torn jeans,a Spanish-American salesman, and, ahead,a black woman folded in an overcoat.Emptiness makes a companionable aurathrough the upstate villages-repetitive,but crucial in their little differencesof fields, wide yards with washing, old machinery-where people livewith highway's patience and flat certainty.

Sometimes I feci sometimesthe .Muse is leaving, the Muse is leaving America.Her tired f.'lce is tired ofiron fields,its hollows sing the mines ofAppalachia,she is a chalk-thin miner's wife with knobbled elbows,her neck tendons taut as banjo strings,she who was once a freckled palomino with a girl's manegalloping blue pastu res plinkcty-plunkety,staring down at a tree-stunned summer lake,when all the corny calendars were true.The departure comes over me in smokeFrom the far f.'lctories.

But were the willows lyres, the fanned-out pollard willowswith clear translation of water into song,were the starlings as heartbroken as nightingales.whose sorrow piles the looming thunderheadover the Catskills, what would be their theme?The spring hills are sun-freckled, the chaste white barns flashthrough screening trees the vigour of her dream,like a white plank bridge over a quarrelling brook.Clear images! Direct as your daughtersin the way their clear look returns your stare,unarguable and final-no, it is more sensual.I am f.'llling in love with America

I must put the cold small pebbles from the springupon my tongue to learn her languageto talk like birch or aspen confidentially.I will knock at the widowed doorofone of these villageswhere she will admit me like a broad meadow,like a blue space between mountains,and holding her arms at the broken elbowsbrush the dank hair from a foreheadas warm a bread or as a homecoming.

64

The Fortunate Traveller

[for Susan Sontag]

And I heard a 'oice in the midst of the four beasts say,

A measure of wheat for a penny.

and three measures of barley for a penny;

and see thou hurt not the oil and the wine.

-REVELATION 6:6

I

It was in winter. Steeples, spirescongealed like holy candles. Rotting snowflaked from Europe's ceiling. A compact man,I crossed the canal in a grey overcoat,on one lapel a crimson buttonholefor the cold ecstasy of the assassin.In the square coffin manacled to my wrist:small countries pleaded through the mesh of graphs,in treble-spaced, Xeroxed forms to the World Bankon which I had scrawled the one word, MERCY;

I sat on a cold benchunder some skeletal lindens.Two other gentlemen, black skins gone greyas theh identical, belted overcoats,crossed the white river.They spoke the stilted Frenchof their dark river,whose hooked worm, multiplying its pale Sickle,could thin the harvest of the winter streets."Then we can depend on you to get us those tractors?""I gave my word.""May my country ask you why you are doing this, sir?"Silence."You know if you betray us, you cannot hide?"A tug. Smoke trailing its dark cry.

At the window in Haiti, I remembera gecko pressed against the hotel glass,with white palms, concentrating head.With a child's hands. Mercy, monsieur. Mercy.Famine sighs like a scytheacross the field of statistics and the desertis a moving mouth. In the hold of this earth10,000,000 shoreless souls are drifting.Somalia: 765,000, their skeletons will go under the tidal sand."We'll meet you in Bristol to conclude the agreement?"Steeples like tribal lances, through congealing fogthe cries of wounded church bells wrapped in cotton,grey mist enfolding the conspiratorl!L-. ....... __ 1_..1 .... _ •• ,..1"""_ ..... .-"I"!t.vf. ..n ':I-t' l"'u:t.orf-

65

No one will look up now to see the jetfade like a \"eevil through a cloud of flour.One flies first-class, one is so fortunate.Like a telescope reversed, the traveller's eyesv.i.ftly screws down the individual sorrowto an oval nest of antic numerals,and the iris, interlocking with this globe,condenses it to zero, then a cloud.Beetle-black taxi from Heathrow to my flat.We are roaches,riddling the state cabinets, entering the dark holesof power, carapaced in topcoats,scuttling around columns, Signalling for taxis,with frantic antennae, to other huddles with roaches;we infect with optimism, and whenthe cabinets crack, we are the firstto scuttle, radiating separatelyback to Geneva, Bonn, Washington, London.

Under the dripping planes of Hampstead Heath,I read her letter again, watching the drizzledisfigure its pleading like mascara. Margo,I cannot bear to watch the nations cry.Then the phone: "We will pay you in Bristol."Days in fetid bedclothes swallOWing cold tea,the phone stifled by the pillow. The teUya blue storm with soundless snow.I'd light the gas and see a tiger's tongue.I was rehearsing the ecstasies of starvationfor what I had to do. And have not c11arity.

I found my pity, desperately researchingthe origins of history, from reed-built communesby sacred lakes, turning with the first sprocketedwater-driven wheels. I smelled imaginationamong bestial hides by the gleam of fat,seeking in all races a common ingenuity.I envisaged an Africa flooded with such light

66

as f<Jchemized the first fields of emmer wheat and barley,when v:e s:.l\ages d~'ed our pale dead with ochre,and bordered our templeswith the ceremonial vulva of the conchin the grey epoch of the obsidian adze.I sowed the Sahara with rippling cereals,my charity fertilized these aridities.

What was my field? Late sixteenth century.My field was a dank acre. A Sussex don,I taught the Jacobean amdeties: The White Devil.Flamineo's torch startles the brooding yews.The drawn end comes in strides. I loved my Duchess,the white flame of her soul blown out betweenthe smoking cypresses. Then I saw children pounceon green meat with a rat's ferocity.

I called them up and took the train to Bristol,my blood the Severn's dregs and silver.On Severn's estuary the pieces flash,Iscarlot's salary, patron saint of spies.I thought, who cares how many million starve?Their rising souls will lighten the world's weightand level its gull-glittering waterline;we left at sunset down the estuary.

England recedes. The forked white gullscreeches, circling back.Even the birds are pulled back by their orbit,even mercy has its magnetic field.

Back in the cabin,I uncap the whisky, the portholemists with glaucoma. By the time I'm pissed,England, England will bethat pale serrated indigo on the sea-line."You are so fortunate, you get to see the world-"Indeed, indeed, sirs, I have seen the world.Spray splashes the portholes and vision blurs.

Leaning on the hot rail, watching the hot sea,I saw them far off, kneeling on hot sandin the piOUS genuflections of the locust,as Ponce's armoured knees crush Floridato the funereal fragrance of white lilies.

67

II

Now I have come to where the phantoms live,I have no fear of phantoms, but of the real.The Sabbath benedictions of the islands.Treble clef of the snail on the scored leaf,the Tantum Ergo of black choristerssoars through the organ pipes of coconuts.Across the dirty beach surpliced with lace,they pass a brown lagoon behind the priest,pale and unshaven in his frayed soutane,into the concrete church at Canaries;as Albert Schweitzer moves to the harmoniumof moming, and to the pluming chimneys,the 17roundswell Hfts Lebensraum, Lebensraum.

o

Black faces sprinkled with continual dewdew on the speckled croton, dewon the hard leaf of the knotted plum tree,dew on the elephant ears of the dasheen.Through Kurtz's teeth, white skull in elephant grass,the imperial fiction sings. Sundaywrinkles downriver from the Heart of Darl."Tless.The heart of darkness is not Africa.The heart of darkness is the core of firein the white center of the holocaust.The heart of darkness is the rubber clawselecting a scalpel in antiseptic light,the hills of children's shoes outside the chimneys,the tinkling nickel instruments on the white altar;Jacob, in his last card, sent me these verses:"Think of a God who doesn't lose His sleepif trees burst into tears or glaciers weep.So, aping His indifference, I write now,not Anno Domini: After Dachau."

68

III

The night maid brings a lamp and draws the blinds.I stay out on the verandah with the stars.Breakfast congealed to supper on its plate.

There is no sea as restless as my mind.The promontories snore. They snore like whales.Cetus, the whale, was Christ.The ember dies, the sky smokes like an ash heap.Reeds wash their hands of guilt and the lagoonis stained. Louder, since it rained,a gauze of sand flies hisses from the marsh.Since God is dead, and these are not His stars,but man-lit, sulphurous, sanctuary lamps,it's in the heart of darkness of this earththat backward tribes keep vigil of His Body,in deya, lampion, and this bedside lamp.Keep the news from their blissful ignorance.Like lice, like lice, the hungry of this earthswarm to the tree of life. If those who starvelike tllese rain-flies who shed glazed wings in lightgrew from sharp shoulder blades their brittle vansand soared towards that tree, how it would seetheah, Justice! But firesdrench them like vermin, quotasprevent them, and they remaincompassionate fodder for the travel book,its paragraphs like windows from a train,for everywhere that earth shows its rib cageand the moon goggles with the eyes of children,we turn away to read. Rimbaud learned that.

Rimbaud, at dusk,idling his wrist in water past templesthe plumed dates still protect in Roman file,knew that we cared less for one human facethan for the scrolls in Alexandria's ashes,that the bright water could not dye his handany more than poetry. The dhow's silhouettemoved through the blinding coinage of the riverthat, endlessly, until we pay one debt,shrouds, every night, an ordinary secret.

69

IV

The drawn sword comes in strides.It stretches for the length of the empty beach;the fishermen's huts shut their eyes tight.Afrisson shakes the palm trees,and sweats on the traveller's tree.They've found out my sanctuary. Philippe, last night:"It had two gentlemen in the village yesterday, sir,asking for you while you was in town.I tell them you was in town. They send to tell you,there is no hurry. They will be coming back:'

In loaves of cloud, and have not charity,the weevil will make a sahara of Kansas,the ant shall eat Russia.Their soft teeth sQall make, and have not charity,the harvest's desolation,and the brown globe crack like a begging bowl,and though you nre oceans of surplus grain,and have not charity,

still, through thin stalks,the smoking stubble, stalksgrasshopper: third horseman,the leather-helmed locust.

70

XVIII

In the other'eighties, a hundred midsummers gonelike the light of domestic paradise, the hedonist'sidea of heaven was a French kitchen's sideboard,apples and clay carafes from Chardin to the Impressionists;art was une trandle de vie, cheese or home-baked breadlight, in their view, was the best that time offered.The eye was the only truth, and whatever traversesthe retina fades when it darkens; the depth of nature mortewas that death itself is only another surfacelike the canvas, since painting cannot capture thought.A hundred midsummers gone, with the rippling accordion,bustled skirts, boating parties, zinc-white strokes on water,girls whose Bushed cheeks wouldn't outlast their roses.Then, like dried-up tubes, the coiled soldierspiled up on the Somme, and Verdun. And the deadless real than a spray burst of chrysanthemums,the identical carmine for still life and for the slaughterof youth. They were right-everything becomesits idea to the painter with easel riDed on his shoulders.

71

Pentecost

Better a jungle in the headthan rootless concrete.Better to stand bewilderedby the fireflies' crooked street;

winter lamps do not showwhere the sidewalk is lost,nor can these tongues ofsnowspeak for the Holy Ghost;

the self-increasing silenceofwords dropped from a roofpoints along iron railings,direction, in not proof

But best is this night surfwith slow scriptures of sand,that sends, not quite a seraph,but a late cormorant,

whose fading cry propelsthrough phosphorescent shoalwhat, in my childhood gospels,used to be called the Soul.

72

Fame

TIUs is Fame: Sundays,an emptinessas in Balthus,

cobbled alleys,sunlit, aureate,a wall, a brown tower

at the end ofa street,a blue without bells,like a dead canvas

set in its whiteframe, and flowers:gladioli, lame

gladioli, stone petalsin a vase. The choir'ssky-high praise

turned off. A bookofprints that turnsby itself. The ticktock

ofhigh heels on a sidewalk.A crawling clock.A craving for work.

73

The Gift and the Craft: An Approach to the Poetry

of Seamus Heaney

In a 1981 interview with John Haffenden, Heaney remarked: "It's possible to exacerbate. . . . I believe that what poetry does to me is comforting. . . . I think that art does appease, assuage."' In Field Work the poet, newly "landed in the hedge-school of Glanmore," renews his commitment "to raise 1 A voice caught back off slug-horn and slow chanter 1 That might continue, hold, dispel, appease." "The Harvest Bow," one of the best poems in this volume, ends by quoting Coventry Patmore, " 'The end of art is peace."' Heaney expresses a view of poetry as secret and natural even though it must operate in a world that is public and brutal. He has found himself caught in the sectarian cross fire with fellow Catholics pressing him to write political verse and liberal critics congratulating him on not taking sides.

For Heaney the great question is: "How with this rage shall beauty hold a plea / Whose action is no stronger than a flower?" His answer is also from Shakespeare-lines from Timorz of Athens which have become, he says, "a touchstone" for him: "Our poesy is as a gum which oozes / From whence 'tis n ~ u r i s h e d . " ~

The concept of "nourishment" is an important one for Heaney. The first part of his Preoccupations: Selected Prose 1968-1978 discusses the things which have nourished his poetry and contributed to the development of a poetic voice which, like Wordsworth's, emerged out of a music overheard in nature and in childhood.

Preoccupations begin with the word "Omphalos," navel, center point. Significantly, it is the sound of the word which first recommends

74

T H E POETRY OF SEAMUS HEANEY

it to his attention: he immediately relates it to the sound of water gushing from the pump in the yard of the farm where he was brought up. The source of his imaginative power, we are to understand, lies in his rural childhood experience that is centered and staked in the image of the pump. The pump, like his poetry, taps hidden springs to con- duct what is sustaining and life-giving. The center of the poet's imaginative world is also the center of family and community life: the women of five households came with their big enamel buckets to draw water from that pump. Its rhythms are the elemental rhythms of nature itself, that continue undisturbed by the American bombers returning to their base nearby, indifferent to the great historical events of the 1940s. The pump is a symbol of the nourishment which comes from knowing and belonging to a certain place and a certain mode of life.

For Heaney, a sense of self depends on a sense of place and a sense of history, something which is typical of the Irish writer and derives to some extent from the Irish writer's desire to protect and preserve what is threatened and diminished. Possession of the land, like possession of different languages, is a matter of particular urgency in Ireland. While the Revival was responsible for trammeling many a poetic talent in an essentially diversionary, regional voice rather than promoting an individual and personal one, it marked the beginning of a discovery of confidence in the Irish writer's own past, his own place, his own speech, English and Irish.

More recently, there was Patrick Kavanagh, whose work helped persuade Heaney of the poetic validity of the regional and traditional. And, from the other side of the cultural and religious divide, John Hewitt, whose "lifelong concern to question and document the relationship between art and locality has provided all subsequent Northern writers with a hinterland of reference, should they require a tradition more intimate than the broad perspectives of the English literary a~hievement."~But just as important as these Irish writers was the influence of Wordsworth, "perhaps the first man to articulate the nurture that becomes available to the feelings through dwelling in one dear perpetual place" (P, p. 145).

Heaney's poetic career began with modest ambitions, by delving into his own childhood past. But gradually he extends his excavation of self to place it in relation to a communal past. He likes to think of his poems as "soundings" that probe the landscape for a shared and diminished culture. He attempts to define and interpret the present by bringing it into significant relationship with the past. Dominated by a sense of nature's powers, he sees history, language, and myth as bound

75

TWENTIETH CENTURY LITERATURE

up with nature, with territory and landscape. The landscape is sacra- mental. It is instinct with signs. Heaney responds to it with a deep sense of the numinous. He is open to intuitions that relate human female psychology and sexuality to the landscape. Landscape becomes a memory, a continuity, a piety, a feared and fecund mother, an insatiable lover.

This sacral vision of place has its origins in his childhood ap-prehension of nature on and around the family farm, which he recalls in the first part of Preoccupations. Lost among the pea-drills, he finds himself in a "sunlit lair . . . a green web, a caul of veined light, a tangle of rods and pods, stalks and tendrils, full of assuaging earth and leaf-smell" (P, p. 17). The experience of another "secret nest" in the hollow bole of a birch tree introduces the image of the wood-lover and tree-hugger which underlies the HeaneyISweeney identification of recent work: "Above your head, the living tree flourished and breathed, you shouldered the slightly vibrant bole, and if you put your forehead to the rough pith you felt the whole lithe and whispering crown of willows moving in the sky above you" (P,p. 18). He remembers bathing naked in a moss-hole: "treading the thick-river mud, unsettling a smoky muck off the bottom and coming out smeared and weedy and darkened" (P, p. 19). This incident is recalled as a "betrothal" and an "initiation," the ritual intensity of Heaney's language indicating an involvement with nature through which his religious and sexual impulses also find expression.

Beyond the security of the farmyard lay "forbidden ground," the "realm of bogeys" (P, p. 19), the haunt of recluses and mystery men who lived on the fringes of the bog. As childhood perspectives widen, the physical landscape assumes a social and historical dimension as well. He becomes aware that he lived in the realm of division as well as the country of community. Mossbawn, the name of the family farm, lay between Castledawson and Toome, between English influence (Castledawson) and native experience (Toome), the demesne and the bog. The demesne was Moyola Park, an estate occupied by Lord Moyola, formerly Major James Chichester-Clark, the ex-Unionist prime minister of Northern Ireland. The bog was where hoards of flints and other relics had been found, reminders that this was one of the oldest inhabited places in the country. Mossbawn itself is a name made up of two words: "Moss," a Scots word brought to Ireland by the Planters; and "bawn," the name the English colonists gave to their fortified farmhouses. Mossbawn-the Planter's house on the bog. Heaney comments, however, that the preferred pronunciation was Moss bann, that

76

T H E POETRY OF SEAMUS HEANEY

"b5n" is the Gaelic word for white, and that the name may therefore mean the moss of bog cotton: "In the syllables of my home I see a metaphor of the split culture of Ulster" (P, p. 35).Mossbawn is bordered by the townlands of Broagh and Anahorish, "forgotten Gaelic music that leads back to the ancient civilization that was destroyed by soldiers and administrators like Spenser and Davies" (P, p. 36).At the same time, Heaney acknowledges that his own perceptions have been conditioned significantly by the English tradition. The countryside of Grove Hill and Back Park, which also bordered the family farm, is recognized as "a version of pastoral," and while "Grove and Park . . . do not reach me as a fibre from a tap-root," they are part of "the intricate and various foliage of history and culture that I grew up beneath" (P, p. 36).

From an early age there was in Heaney's life another love as well as nature: ''I was in love with words themselves" (P, p. 45).Words as verbal music is another source of assuagement, and it is the poet's delight in words which more than anything else nourishes his poetry. "The secret of being a poet, Irish or otherwise," Heaney says, "lies in the summon- ing of the energies of words" (P, p. 36).

In Preoccupations he traces his love of words back to childhood as he does his love of nature. He recalls his first experience of how words as bearers of history and mystery began to invite him: listening to his mother recite lists of affixes and suffixes, Latin roots with English meanings, rhymes that had been part of her schooling. Then there was the "exotic listing" (P,p. 45)of Stuttgart, Leipzig, Oslo, Hilversum, on the wireless dial; the "beautiful sprung rhythms" (P, p. 45)of the old BBC weather forecast: Dogger, Rockall, Malin, Shetland, Faroes, Finisterre; "the gorgeous and inane phraseology" (P, p. 45) of the Catechism; the litany of the Blessed Virgin. At school there was his introduction to the classic canon of English poetry, the "roadside rhymes" (P, p. 26) chants that were scurrilous and sectarian, and the reading of Irish myths and legends. Later came the conscious savoring of the music of an English education: Keats, Webster, Anglo-Saxon verse, Wordsworth, and Hopkins, who receives a special mention because of the similarity between his energetic, hard-edged, consonantal music and Heaney's own Ulster dialect.

All this he mentions as contributing to the process of finding a poetic voice. That voice, he explains, is composed of two elements. There is that part of the poetry which takes its structure and beat, its play of meter and rhythms, its diction and allusiveness, from the literary tradition. And there are also those "intonations and appease-

77


ments" (P, p. 62) offered by a poet's music which are instinctual, unconscious, and preverbal, made up of the kinds of noise which assuage him, pleasure or repel him, drawn from the world around him. They are the inklings and echoes which reach him from "all the realms of ~ h i s p e r . " ~Heaney speaks of the private and cultural "depth-charges" (P, p. 150) latent in certain words and sounds and rhythms and kinds of rhyme. There is a "binding secret" between words, "which delights not just the ear but the whole backward abysm of mind and body" (P, p. 150). One is reminded of Eliot's "auditory imagination": "The feeling for syllable and rhythm, penetrating far below the conscious levels of thought and feeling, invigorating every word; sinking to the most primitive and forgotten, returning to the origin and bringing something back."5 The personal and Irish pieties Heaney thinks of as vowels, and the literary awareness nourished on English as conso-nants. His poems, he hopes, will be "vocables" (P, p. 37), adequate to his whole experience.

One way in which Heaney describes the process of turning feeling into words is as an "oozing" that starts with the "gazing heart," the "listening ear," a "wise passivity." Poems come up out of the dark, organically oozing up into consciousness:

I have always listened for poems, they come sometimes like bodies come out of a bog, almost complete, seeming to have been laid down a long time ago, surfacing with a touch of mystery. They certainly involve craft and determination, but chance and instinct have a role in the thing too. (P, p. 34).

The voice in Heaney's poetry is the voice that is found to express what Eliot termed "a dark embryo." It originates in a primary generating surrender to the poet's donnees. Discussing the difference between "technique" and "craft," Heaney says:

The crucial action is pre-verbal, to be able to allow the first alertness or come-hither, sensed in a blurred or incomplete way, to dilate and approach as a thought or a theme or a phrase. . . . That first emergence involves the divining, vatic, oracular function. (P, p. 49).

This is technique. Technique is what allows the first stirring of the mind around a word, a rhythm, an image, or a memory to grow toward articulation, articulation not necessarily in terms of argument or expli- cation, but in terms of "its own potential for harmonious self-reproduction" (P, p. 48).

The second activity is "the making function" that depends on "craftu-the "thought" finding the words. Sometimes, Heaney admits,

78

T H E POETRY O F SEAMUS HEANEY

it is not easy to distinguish between feeling getting into words, and words turning into feeling. His title, Door into the Dark, he says, was a gesture toward the idea of words themselves being doors.

Wordsworth is Heaney's primary model of the poet as diviner. Wordsworth is attentive to the invitations of "the mind's internal echo," and sets out to discover the verbal means which will amplify his original visionary excitement into "a redundant energy / Vexing its own creation." Heaney begins a discussion of his own poetry in "Feeling into Words" by quoting from The Prelude:

The hiding places of my power Seem open; I approach, and then they close; I see by glimpses now; when age comes on, May scarcely see at all, and I would give, While yet we may, as far as words can give, A substance and a life to what I feel: I would enshrine the spirit of the past For future generations.

Heaney embraces these lines as a statement of his own view of what poetry means to him:

Implicit in those lines is a view of poetry which I think is implicit in the few poems I have written that give me any right to speak: poetry as divination, poetry as revelation of the self to the self, as restoration of the culture to itself; poems as elements of con-tinuity, with the aura and authenticity of archaeological finds, where the buried shard has an importance that is not diminished by the importance of the buried city; poetry as a dig, a dig for finds that end up being plants. (P, p. 41).

The Wordsworthian method of composition is contrasted with the Yeatsian view of poetry: "When he talked about poetry, Yeats never talked about the 'ooze' or 'nurture'. He always talked about the 'labour' and the 'making' and the 'fascination of what's difficult.' " 6-

Heaney develops this contrast between "receiving" and "making" into a view of poetic creation as either a "feminine" or a "masculine" activity:

From Shakespeare's ooze to Eliot's dark embryo, we have a vision of poetic creation as a feminine action, almost par-thenogenetic, where it is the ovum and its potential rather than the sperm and its penetration that underlies their accounts of poetic origins. And out of this vision of feminine action comes a language for poetry that tends to brood and breed, crop and cluster, with a texture of echo and implication, trawling the pool of the ear with a net of associations. (P, p. 83).

Poetry to Keats, says Heaney, has a physical equivalent in a mother's

79


birth pangs. But Hopkins brings to his craft a "siring instinct": "Keats has the life of a swarm, fluent and merged; Hopkins has the design of a honeycomb, definite and loaded. In Keats the rhythm is narcotic, in Hopkins it is a stimulant to the mind. Keats woos us to receive, Hopkins alerts us to perceive" (P, p. 85). Hopkins strikes his fire from flint and, unlike the organic "oozy marshlight" of symbolism, Hopkins' poetry is fretted rather than fecund, maintaining a design rather than releasing a flow, exuding a masculine brilliance and revealing the presence of "powerful and active thought" (P, p. 86) that disciplines the music and takes charge of the language and emotion. It is possible for the two opposing spirits of poetry to be reconciled: Yeats is said to prove "that deliberation can be so intensified that it becomes synonymous with inspiration" (P, p. 110).

Everywhere in his writings Heaney is acutely sensitive to the opposition between masculine will and intelligence on the one hand, and, on the other, feminine instinct and emotion; between architectonic mascu- linity and natural female feeling for mystery and divination. It is the opposition between the arena of public affairs and the intimate, secret stations of "the realms of whisper." He uses it to describe the tension between English influence and Irish experience ("The feminine ele- ment for me involves the matter of Ireland and the masculine strain is drawn from involvement with English literature" [P, p. 1321). It underlies two different responses to landscape, one that is "lived, illiterate and unconscious," and one that is "learned, literate and conscious" (P, p. 131). Early poems like "Digging" and "Follower" establish his troubling self-consciousness about the relationship between "roots and reading," the lived and the learned.

In attempting to resolve these contrarieties, the example of Patrick Kavanagh was invaluable. Kavanagh, the son of a country shoemaker in Inishkeen, County Monaghan, made the move from his native parish to London in 1937, and then in 1939 to Dublin, where he spent most of the rest of his life. Kavanagh's career seemed to Heaney to parallel much in his own, especially the conflict between "the illiterate self that was tied to the little hills and earthed in the stony grey soil and the literate self that pined for 'the City of Kings / Where art, music and letters were the real things' " (P, p. 137). The importance to Heaney of Kavanagh's "The Great Hunger" lay in the balance achieved between "intimacy with actual clay" (P, p. 122) and "the penalty of consciousness" (P, p. 118), through which Kavanagh proved the poet's imaginative self-sufficiency within his own parish. Kavanagh's assertion that "parochialism is universal, it deals with fundamentalsw7 gave Heaney

80

THE POETRY OF SEAMUS HEANEY

confidence in the poetic validity of his own preoccupation with his County Derry childhood. From Kavanagh's most successful work he could learn from a poet who had managed to develop ironic points of vantage on his material, which promoted the articulation of more subtle, complex feelings about the relationship between poet and place.

The pervasiveness of the masculine/feminine opposition in Heaney's writings about himself and other poets originates in a deep- seated sense of his own divided feelings and experience. His poetry reflects the attempt to reconcile the tension. The poem, Heaney says, should be a "completely successful love act between the craft and the gift."8 But it is the gift, the initial incubatory action, he keeps remind- ing us, which is for him the crucial stage in the creative process. A poem, he believes, can survive stylistic blemishes that are due to inadequate crafting, but "it cannot survive a still-birth" (P, p. 49). Poetry is essentially a mystery, a corpse from the bog, a whispering from the dark, a gift from the goddess. The poet is passive receiver before he is an active maker.

There are times, however, when Heaney felt guilty or exasperated with this essentially passive role and wanted poetry to do something; when he wished to be a man of action making direct political statements rather than an equivocator, a parablist, a supplicant, or a withdrawn aesthete. From the beginning, from that opening image in the first poem in his first volume, "Digging," the shadow of a gunman is present, as if to convince us that the pen can be as mighty as the gun. He compensates for his failure to follow men of action by making prom- ises: he'll dig with his pen he says. The theme does not become promi- nent until North, where art and the role of the artist come under his tormented scrutiny. By then Ulster was in a state of war.

Despite the lapse of confidence in art which North evinces-and the intensity of the anguish it occasioned should not be underestimated, as the last poem in North, "Exposure," would testify-the great bulk of Heaney's prose statements, comments to interviewers, and reviews of other writers are made from the point of view of a poet. When he turns to fellow poets, he tends to focus on their use of language, their verbal music, before theme or meaning. He never comments from the point of view of a politically committed spokesman, rarely even from a strictly academic viewpoint. He registers his appreciation of poetry as "self- delighting buds on the old bough of tradition" (P,p. 174). He takes the politically committed artist to task, in this case the Marxist, for attempting "to sweep the poetic enterprise clean of those somewhat hedonistic impulses towards the satisfactions of aural and formal play

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out of which poems arise, whether they aspire to delineate or to obfus- cate 'things as they are' " (P, p. 174). Typically, Paul Muldoon qualifies as "one of the very best" for "the opulence of the music, the overspill of creative joy," for his exploitation of "the language's potential for generating new meanings out of itself. . . this sense of buoyancy, this delight in the trickery and lechery that words are capable of' (P, p. 2 13).

"During the last few years," Heaney stated in 1975, "there has been considerable expectation that poets from Northern Ireland should 'say' something about 'the situation.' " Heaney's comment on this demand was that "in the end they [poets] will only be worth listening to if they are saying something about and to them~elves."~ Poetry for Heaney is its own special action, has its own mode of reality. In his review of the Russian poet Osip Mandelstam, who had found it impossible to make an accommodation with Soviet realities under Stalin, Heaney writes:

We live here in critical times ourselves, when the idea of poetry as an art is in danger of being overshadowed by a quest for poetry as a diagram of political attitudes. Some commentators have all the fussy literalism of an official from the ministry of truth. (P, p. 219).

What Heaney's review asserts is the urgent need to fight for the very life of poetry in a world which seems increasingly to discount it. He elevates the artist's work above the moralist's. The principle of the autonomy of art frees the artist from tendentiousness, vulgar moraliz- ing, and political propagandizing. A cut below the surface, however, are the whole world's concerns which, by virtue of the poet's "aesthetic distance," can be treated with a kind of passionate detachment, a concerned disinterestedness. Heaney speaks as an apologist of the "religion of art." The Mandelstam review begins with this impassioned pronouncement:

"Art for Art's Sake" has become a gibe because of an inadequate notion of what art can encompass, and is usually bandied by people who are philistines anyhow. Art has a religious, a binding force, for the artist. Language is the poet's faith and the faith of his fathers and in order to go his own way and do his proper work in an agnostic time, he has to bring that faith to the point of arrogance and triumphalism. (P, p. 217).

Inevitably, however, politics come into communication with the poetical function, but legitimately only when the political situation has first been emotionally experienced and reduced to subordinate status in an aesthetically created universe of symbols. If Heaney's poetry automatically encompasses politics, he is careful that it should not serve

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them. In this respect the Yeatsian aesthetic is exemplary. There is a passage from Yeats's essay, "Samhain: 1905," part of which Heaney quotes at the beginning of Preoccupations:

One cannot be less than certain that the poet, though it may well be for him to have right opinions, above all if his country be at death's door, must keep all opinion that he holds to merely because he thinks it right, out of poetry, if it is to be poetry at all. At the enquiry which preceded the granting of a patent to the Abbey Theatre I was asked if Cathleen ni Houlihan was not written to affect opinion. Certainly it was not. I had a dream one night which gave me a story, and I had certain emotions about this country, and I gave those emotions expression for my own pleasure. If I had written to convince others I would have asked myself, not "Is that exactly what I think and feel?" but "How would that strike so-and-so? How will they think and feel when they have read it?" And all would be oratorical and insincere. If we understand our own minds, and the things that are striving to utter themselves through our minds, we move others, not because we have understood or thought about those others, but because all life has the same root. Coventry Patmore has said, "The end of art is peace," and the following of art is little different from the following of religion in the intense preoccupation it demands.1°

Like Yeats, Heaney writes political poetry; but, also like Yeats, he is not political in any doctrinaire sense. As a man like any other man, politics are part of his life: being a poet does not separate him from the concerns of common humanity. What being a poet means is that his concern cannot simply be with abstract ideas, but with ideas suffused and shaped by emotion, and absorbed at the deepest levels of con-sciousness. T h e Yeatsian declaration that poetry is "expression for my own pleasure" is echoed by Joyce's shade in "Station Island," when he advises the poet, "The main thing is to write 1 for the joy of it." Art and politics may come from different imaginative "levels" of the personality if the art is good, original, deep, authentic enough: if the latter is the case (that is, in the case of good writers) the artistic insight is prophetic, "true," at a deeper level, and for a longer time, than any political idea can be.

In an interview with Seamus Deane, Heaney sought to explain the political nature of his poetry:

Poetry is born out of the watermarks and colourings of the self. But that self in some ways takes its spiritual pulse from the inward spiritual structuring of the community to which it belongs; and the community to which I belong is Catholic and

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Nationalist. I believe that the poet's force now, and hopefully in the future, is to maintain the efficacy of his own "mythos," his own cultural and political colourings, rather than to serve any particular momentary strategy that his political leaders, his para-military organization or his own liberal self might want him to serve. I think that poetry and politics are, in different ways, an articulation, an ordering, a giving form to inchoate pieties, prej- udices, world-views, or whatever. And I think that my own poetry is a kind of slow, obstinate, papish burn, emanating from the ground I was brought up on."

Heaney will not renounce tribal prejudice as the rational humanist would urge, but write out of it in such a way as to clarify his own feelings, not to encourage--or discourage-prejudice in others. That would be propaganda-the didactic achieved at the expense of the poetic. "We make out of the quarrel with others rhetoric," Yeats has said, "but out of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry." Clearly, Yeats, like Heaney, was preoccupied with the opposition between the divided selves of the poet, between the poet as poet and the poet as a human being like other human beings. "In most poets," writes C. Day Lewis, "there is an intermittent conflict between the poetic self and the rest of the man; and it is by reconciling the two, not by eliminating the one, that they can reach their full stature."12 Heaney strives for such a reconciliation-a reconciliation between primitive piety and rational humanism, between illiterate fidelity to origins and a sense of objective reality, between the feminine and the masculine impulses.

For Heaney, the ultimate example of this kind of synthesis is Dante. Discussing how the modern poet has used Dante, Heaney shows how Eliot discovered the political Dante, the poet with a "universal language," the artist as seer and repository of tradition, one who was prepared to submit his intelligence and sensibility to the disciplines of "philosophia" and religious orthodoxy: "Eliot's ultimate attraction is to the way Dante could turn values and judgements into poetry, the way the figure of the poet as thinker and teacher merged into the figure of the poet as expresser of a universal myth that could unify the abun- dance of the inner world and the confusion of the outer."13 All poets turn to great masters of the past to recreate them in their own image. This was the "stern and didactic"14 image of Dante that Eliot discovered in the struggle to embrace a religious faith. Mandelstam, on the other hand, in the effort to free himself from the pressures of Stalinist orthodoxy, discovers a different Dante: "Dante is not perceived as the mouthpiece of an orthodoxy but rather as the apotheosis of free,

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natural, biological process, as a hive of bees, a process of crystallization, a hurry of pigeon flights, a focus for all the impulsive, instinctive, nonutilitarian elements in the creative life."15

For his own part, Heaney responds to the Dante who "could place himself in a historical world yet submit that world to scrutiny from a perspective beyond history," who "could accommodate the political and the transcendent." Dante, says Heaney, is the great model for the poet who "would explore the typical strains which the consciousness labours under in this country. T h e main tension is between two often con-tradictory commands: to be faithful to the collective historical experience and to be true to the recognitions of the emerging self."16 Heaney's goal is the achievement of that momentary peace in which all oppositions a re reconciled in the self-contained, transcendent poetic symbol.

John Haffenden, Viewpoints: Poets in Conversation (London: Faber, 1981), p. 68.

Seamus Heaney, Preoccupations: Selected Prose 1968-1978 (London: Faber, 1980), p. 33. Subsequent references will be cited parenthetically in the text as P .

"uoted by Michael Longley in "Poetry" in Causeway: The Arts in Ulster, ed. Michael Longley (Belfast: Arts Council of Northern Ireland, 1971), pp. 106-07.

The phrase is from Heaney's poem, "Shelf Life," in Station Island (Lon-don: Faber, 1984), p. 24.

T. S. Eliot, The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism (London: Faber, 1933), p. 119.

Heaney, in interview with Patrick Garland, "Poets on Poetry," in The Listener, 8 November 1973, p. 629.

Patrick Kavanagh, "The Parish and the Universe," in Collected Pruse (Lon-don: Martin, Brien & O'Keefe, 1973), p. 283.

Interview with Garland. Seamus Heaney, Poetry Book Society Bulletin, 85 (Summer 1975), 1.

l o W . B. Yeats, "Samhain: 1905," in Explo?.ations (London: Macmillan, 1962), pp. 198-99. See also Preoccupations, p. 7.

l 1 Heaney, in interview with Seamus Deane, "Unhappy and at Home," in The Crane Bag, No. 1 (1977), 67.

l2 C. Day Lewis, "Poetry and Politics," in Twentieth Century Poetry: Critical Essays and Documents, ed. Graham Martin and P. N. Furbank (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1975), p. 178.

lYSeamus Heaney, "Envies and Identifications: Dante and the Modern Poet," in Irish University Review (Spring 1985), 14.

l 4 Ibid. I5Ibid., p. 18. 161bid., pp. 18-19.

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LITERARY PROFILE

Derek Walcott: an island poet and his sea Mark A Mc Watt

The work of Derek Walcott must be seen in terms of his relationship to the islands and sea of the Caribbean; to the sense of people and place that awakened and forged his talent, and to the social and educational environment in which it matured. Some of the most famous voices that sing the poet's praises abroad seem (deliberately?) oblivious to his Caribbean context, and can therefore sound somewhat hollow and distorted. Joseph Brodsky, the Nobel prize-winning poet and friend of Walcott, quarrels with those who speak of him as a 'West Indian poet' or as a 'black poet from the Caribbean', and he himself prefers to think of Walcott simply as 'the great poet of the English language'.'

Yet, for West Indian readers and critics there is much more to be considered than what Seamus Heaney refers to as Walcott's 'deep and sonorous possession' of the English l a n g ~ a g e , ~ or how he ranks with other English-language poets world-wide. In the first place, for the West Indian audience and critic, Walcott is not only-or even primarily-a poet, but also a man of the theatre, a playwright and the founder of important theatre movements in the region. It is probable that many more West Indians have seen his plays than have read the poems. This perception of a double Walcott-poet and playwright-is itself important, as it suggests the several aspects of 'doubleness' associated with the West Indian identity. Part of our response to Walcott involves a complex dynamic of self-recognition whereby we reciprocate his own sense of writing for his people by seeing ourselves in his personae and characters as well as in the 'schizophrenic' author behind them.

In the opening sections of the poem 'The Schooner Flight' we find the red-nigger persona, Shabine, stealing away at dawn from his home, his sleeping mistress and his island; as he gets into the taxi that is taking him to his departing ship, the driver recognises him:

'This time, Shabine, like you really gone!' I ain't answer the ass, I simply pile in the back seat and watch the sky burn above Laventille pink as the gown in which the woman I left was sleeping, and I look in the rearview and see a man

' Joseph Brodsky, 'On Derek Walcott', New York Review of Books, 10 November 1983, p 39. Seamus Heaney, 'The Language of Exile' (Review of The Star-AppleKingdom). Parnussus: Poetry in Review (8), Fall-Winter 1979, p 8.

TWQ lO(4) October 198811SSN 0143-5597/88. S1.25 1607

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exactly like me, and the man was weeping for the houses, the streets, that whole fucking island. (p 345)'

These lines of Shabine can be seen as expressing Walcott's own feelings about the islands of the Caribbean: there is the fierce, almost corrosive love for the physical beauty, for the familiar streets and houses; the domestic attachment to home and woman and yet the movement away, and the tears of frustration and betrayal caused by this wrenching. The paradox of the moment's emotions is also conveyed in the split between observing self and image in the mirror, and the sense of doubleness proliferates in the simultaneity of tears and bravado, the fineness of sensibility and the coarseness of language-the expletive and the breaking heart. All of these dualities powerfully embody the familiar (but eternally real) problems of West Indian identity as well as the particular relationship between the writer and his island home.

On 23 January 1930Derek Alton Walcott was born in Castries, St Lucia. As a mulatto he was aware from very early of his double heritage, of black and white ancestors; this split was reinforced by other factors such as his methodist, middle-class upbringing on an island that was largely Catholic and poor, and in particular by the colonial education which emphasised the formal language at the expense of dialect, and which taught the tradition of English literature from the classics to the moderns. This is not to say that Walcott was particularly troubled by this heritage; his was a fairly common West Indian position, in which it was easy to accept the paradoxes. Walcott himself says: 'In that simple, schizophrenic boyhood one could lead two lives: the interior life of poetry, the outward life of action and d ia ie~t . '~

Walcott's great sensitivity to the literature he read at school-which included a sense of its power and the significance it bestowed on people and place-filled him with the urge to recreate his island home; as a painter he tried to capture it on canvas, as a poet he longed to summon it to the kind of life and power he discerned in the poetry he read. In Another Life,' his long autobiographical poem, he tells how he and his friend Gregorias (the artist, Dunstan St Omer) swore

that we would never leave the island until we had put down, in paint, in words, as palmists learn the network of a hand, all of its sunken, leaf-choked ravines, every neglected, self-pitying inlet muttering in brackish dialect.. . (p 194)

The Star-Apple Kingdom, London: Cape, 1980. However, this and all subsequent quotations of Walcott's poetry are taken from Derek Walcott. Collected Poems 1948-1984, New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1986, to which the bracketed page-numbers apply. 'What the Twilight Says, An Overture', in Dream on Monkey Mountain and Other Plavs, London: Cape, 1972, p 6. Another Life, London: Cape, 1973.

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This exuberant love for the island and the need to sanctify it in song-along with the significant experiences of his youth-comes across clearly in his earliest poetry. Walcott published privately, and within the region, his first three collections of poems; these were 25 Poems (Trinidad: Guardian Commercial Printery, 1948); Epitaph for the Young: XII cantos (Barbados: Advocate, 1949); and Poems (Jamaica: City Printery, 195 1).

It was, however, over a decade later that Walcott began to be known internationally, with the publication in 1962 of In a Green Night: Poems 1948-1960 (London: Jonathan Cape). Among the earlier poems in this collection is 'A City's Death by Fire', about the fire that destroyed Castries in 1948:

After that hot gospeller had levelled all but the churched sky I wrote the tale by tallow of a city's death by fire . . . (p 6 )

Here one can see the deliberate assumption of the role of poet and, as Walcott carries out his self-set task, the diction and imagery echo the English poets he had been reading-particularly Dylan Thomas: the 'churched sky' becomes 'the bird-rocked sky' in a later line and the poet walks 'among the rubbled tales'. Later poems in the collection suggest the poetry of seventeenth-century England, with references to John Donne and Thomas Traherne. The title-poem echoes a line from Andrew Marvell's 'Bermudas', and that echo is reinforced throughout, with the diction and the measured formality of seventeenth-century verse, by the image of the orange tree which dominates the poem and becomes, by the end, a metaphysical conceit.

In this volume the young poet is obviously experimenting with styles, learning his craft; and yet the voice remains true to the Caribbean setting, and authentic in terms of the West Indian experience. In 'A Sea-Chantey', Odysseus and 'Cyclopic volcanoes'-summoned easily from the poet's familiarity with the classics-are balanced with the names of Caribbean islands and island schooners. The poem goes on to unite all in a litany that movingly evokes the calm of the island sabbath, ending with the thrice-repeated line: 'the amen of calm waters' (p 46). In other poems he is concerned as much with Caribbean man and society as with the landscape; 'Tales of the Islands' is a virtuoso performance by the young poet, a sequence of ten sonnets which depict not only various examples of the physical landscape of the Caribbean, but also aspects of the psychological landscape as well, while the human characters such as Cosimo de Chretien and Miss Rossignol struggle with the bewildering or sinister legacies of West Indian history. But perhaps the most important poems in the collection, in terms of the divided nature of the West Indian personality, are 'Ruins of a Great House' and 'A Far Cry From Africa'. In the former, Walcott juxtaposes the artistic spirit and achievements of seventeenth-century England with its appetite for bloody conquest and slaves in the Caribbean. Through a careful meditation on the transience of life and power, he arrives, almost in spite of

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himself ('so differently from what the heart arranged'), at a curious hollowness and vulnerability at the heart of imperial conquest, and therefore at a sense of compassion for all. In 'A Far Cry From Africa' he uses the Mau Mau struggle in Kenya as an occasion for reflecting on his dual ancestry; he declares himself 'divided to the vein', unable to choose between 'this Africa and the English tongue I love' (p 17). This is an important theme to which Walcott returns in later poems such as 'Verandah' and in some of the plays.

Walcott's sense of the theatre grew out of his perception of the theatrical all around him as a boy: in the street-corner revivalist meetings at night, lit by gas-lamp and complete with song and music and dramatic conversions; in the lives of the poor whose freedom he envied; and in the derelict characters of the city whose flamboyant physical and mental defects suggested the magic of the theatre. So, apart from beginning 'marathon poems on Greek heroes', Walcott would play at theatre with his brother Roderick (also a noted dramatist): 'little men made from twigs, enacting melodramas of hunting and e~cape . '~ Walcott's first play was Henri Christophe, produced in 1950 by the St Lucia Arts Guild, which Walcott himself had helped to found. The play is important because of its perception of West Indian history and of the West Indian hero; Christophe afforded the young playwright the opportunity of writing about a West Indian king in the manner of Shakespearean and Jacobean drama. As with the early poetry, the style and language of this first play are derivative and experimental; the characters (including illiterates) speak in the stiff and remote language of Jacobean drama: all this serves, nevertheless, to portray again that split between white mind and black body which Walcott reads as part of the West Indian condition. His handling of the events of the play as 'one race's quarrel with another's God" reinforces this theme and remains true to the vision of a divided West Indian psyche.

In 1950 Walcott left St Lucia on a scholarship to the University College of the West Indies, in Jamaica, where he received a BA in English, French and Latin. In Jamaica Walcott directed a student production of Henri Christophe and published Poems, the aforementioned early volume of poetry. After leaving university he worked for a few years in teaching and journalism in Grenada, Trinidad and Jamaica, before settling in Trinidad in 1959. The move to Trinidad was an important one for several reasons: the Trinidadian population was large enough and the society sufficiently varied and sophisticated to allow a creative writer the freedom to function; Trinidad's traditions of carnival and calypso were important in the development of Walcott's later drama, and it was in Trinidad that he founded the most important theatrical group, the Little Carib Theatre Workshop, which he honed into a fine company of actors and the perfect vehicle for his own plays. The name of the group was later changed to the Trinidad Theatre Workshop.

See 'What the Twilight Says' in Dream on Monkey Mountain, pp 21-23 ' 'What the Twilight Says', Dream on Monkey Mountain, p 13.

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After a few shorter plays which suggested various influences, including classical Greek drama and J M Synge, Walcott completed his apprenticeship as a playwright and found his own authentic dramatic idiom in two superb plays, Ti-Jean and his Brothers and Dream on Monkey Mountain. Unlike Christophe, the protagonists in these plays have no royal pretensions, but are heroes in the folk tradition. Ti-Jean is the third son of the folk tale who succeeds where his elder brothers fail, but he is also the true revolutionary who overthrows white colonial rule, for Walcott's devil is also the old man of the forest and the white planter, both of whom are tricked by Ti-Jean's cunning and resourcefulness. Yet it is a folk cunning, and the resourcefulness of the peasant, making use of the powers of the forest creatures and the wisdom of his mother. Similarly, Makak, the ugly charcoal burner of Dream on Monkey Mountain, using his own resources of imagination and the richness of experience, undertakes the purifying dream of his people, wherein he undergoes suffering but emerges with a clear sense of self and identity, and rid of his fear and hatred of whiteness. It is a revolutionary dream, like Ti-Jean's actions, and these folk heroes suggest strategies for survival and success in the Caribbean context. The plays also represent Walcott's concern for, and involvement with, the community. Through an involvement with the folk and the community the hero arrives at a true sense of self, whereas in the poems the movement seems to be in the opposite direction-through a contemplation of self towards a vision of community.

In The Castaway and Other Poems (1965) and The Gulf(1970), we see concern with the self as isolated, separated from the outside world and having to forge links with that world. This balances the folk themes of the drama and it seems that, at this stage of Walcott's career, the duality or schizophrenia is reflected in the split between poetry and drama. The figure of the castaway alone on his beach suggests the loneliness of the artist, trying to make sense, not only of his world, but of himself in relation to it, whether it be the fertile horrors of a swamp, in the poem of that name, or the squalor of a teeming slum, as in 'Laventille', where the poet is isolated by his sense of history and the peculiar depth of his feeling. In 'Crusoe's Island' there are images of the castaway, the hermit and the artist, all suggesting the same condition, all emphasising separation and the failure of community. At the end of the poem the community is present in the children of Tobago, on the beach or returning for vespers, but the poet cannot reach or change them:

. . . nothing I can learn From art or loneliness Can bless them as the bell's transfiguring tongue can bless. (p 72)

The poet has killed God, his competitor, and cannot join their simple community of faith, he can only write about them-art becomes the substitute for community, or the consolation for its loss. In The Gulf the poet remains

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isolated; he cannot dance to the carnival music in 'Mass Man', the 'coruscating, mincing fantasies' of the themes and costumes of the bands are no match for the historical ghosts that dance in the poet's memory and he plays instead the whipped slave hanging from a gibbet, his mind already on Ash-Wednesday. The poet's art becomes one of atonement, not so much for history as for the forgetfulness and waste of the carnival culture. The separation between poet and society is further emphasised in 'Blues', where he is beaten when he approaches a gang of black youths in the American south, and in the title-poem, where he meditates on the USA and its history from behind the window of a plane flying over the Gulf of Mexico. In the collection, the gulf becomes a metaphor for all kinds of separation and for the gap between the poet and the people and places he loves.

Anorher Life (1973), Walcott's autobiographical poem, is an important landmark in his work because it supplies details of his artistic development and early career in St Lucia, while developing some of the themes and concerns of his poetry in The Gulf, speculating on the nature of art and memory. All is expressed in a tough, flexible medium that proves as suitable for the sparkling flights of lyricism as it is for the narrative or meditative sections and the passages of pure invective. Apart from tracing important relationships which the young writer enjoyed (notably with the painters, Harry Simmons and Dunstan St Omer), the poem shows his love for the island and its people. He tells of an incident, an epiphany, that occurred 'in the August of my fourteenth year': wandering in the hills above the town he succumbs to a sudden wave of pity for the island and its people:

. . . I felt compelled to kneel, I wept for nothing and for everything, I wept for the earth of the hill under my knees, for the grass, the pebbles, for the cooking smoke above the labourer's houses like a cry. . . . . . For their lights that shine through the hovels like litmus . . . (p 184)

These are the love and the tears that Shabine experiences as he leaves Trinidad in 'The Schooner Flight'. Such intimate revelations of feeling are balanced in the poem by Walcott's more public voice, the voice he uses to castigate the philistinism of Caribbean society which allows its artists to die in poverty and neglect. The whole of the poem's chapter 19, entitled 'Frescoes of the New World II', is a scathing indictment of governments and other institutions in the region which betray their people in order to feather their own nests or to play games of power. The chapter is probably the finest piece of poetic invective in West Indian literature. The poet consigns to the sulphurous hell of Soufriire:

all o' dem big boys, so, dem ministers, ministers of culture, ministers of development, the green blacks, and their old toms,

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and all the syntactical apologists of the Third World explaining why their artists die by their own hands, magicians of the New Vision. Screaming the same shit. (p 269)

Living in Trinidad in the late 1960s, with the growing Black Power movement which culminated in the uprising of 1970, Walcott's concern with questions of politics and ideology-and the prominence of these themes within his work-inevitably grew. These topics are treated in poems such as 'Junta', in The Gulf, and 'Parades Parades', in Sea Grapes (1976); but it is perhaps in the collection The Star-Apple Kingdom (1980) that this theme really comes to the fore. Shabine in 'The Schooner Flight' is seen to be the victim of a corrupt minister for whom he smuggled scotch-and was made the scapegoat after the minister's investigation of himself. In the title-poem of the collection, which Walcott wrote after reading The Autumn of the Patriarch (1975) by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, there is a wonderful portrait of the regional prime ministers cutting up the Caribbean sea like bolts of blue and green cloth and selling it 'at a mark-up to the conglomerates' (p 390), much as Garcia Marquez's dictator had sold the sea and was forced as a result to live on the edge of a vast bowl of dust. The mood of Walcott's poem echoes the troubled mood of Jamaica under the Manley government. The sinister female figure in the poem, who calls herself the revolution and whose lineage is Latin and Catholic, suggests nevertheless the curious strength of Jamaican women and embodies both the hope and the menace of that time.

The political themes also figure in Walcott's plays of this later period. One of Walcott's ambitions of this time seems to have been to write a successful Broadway musical: in collaboration with Galt MacDermot (who was responsible for the music of the Broadway hit, Hair), he wrote The Joker of Seville (1974) and 0 Babylon (1976).' Neither play found its way to Broadway, but 0 Babylon is important for its portrayal of the Rastafarians of Jamaica and their struggle against the Babylon of exploitative big business, the police and the narrow attitudes of middle-class society towards them. These two plays are also significant in that they were the last two plays performed by the Trinidad Theatre Workshop under Walcott's direction; he broke with the Workshop in 1976. Two later plays, Remembrance (1977) and Pantomime (1978) also engage with political theme^.^ The main protagonist of the former, Albert Perez Jordan, has lost his elder son in the 1970 Black Power uprising and remains bewildered and scornful of a political conviction he cannot understand. In this play Walcott explores, with satirical insight but also with compassion, the gap between the mental attitudes and the political awareness of Perez Jordan and his children; between his 'real' foreign war and their playing at revolution; between the dedication and sense of purpose he felt as a teacher, and the aimlessness of the

The Joker of Seville and 0 Babylon are published in a single volume by London: Cape, 1979. Remembrance and Pantomime are published in a single volume by London: Faber & Faber, 1980.

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younger generation (his younger son is an artist who paints an American flag on the roof). The other play, Pantomime, is a kind of blacklwhite fable where Walcott explores the humour and irony in the two characters' reversal of the roles of Robinson Crusoe and Friday. It is a reprise of several themes-that of the castaway, of racial divisions (black bodylwhite mind) and West Indian identity, and the larger theme of illusion and reality. Like Ti-Jean or Makak, the characters struggle through to an understanding not only of themselves and their relationship to each other, but also of the forces and attitudes historically responsible for the social divisions of the Caribbean; the humour in the play balances a serious message concerning the encounter of slave and colonial master and all the consequent problems of that relationship.

After his break with the Theatre Workshop in Trinidad Walcott turned his attention increasingly to the USA, where he took up sessional teaching assignments at US universities. Since 1981 he has been teaching creative writing at Boston University and returning to the Caribbean as often as he can. His most recent poetry reflects this new 'doubleness' as he is now a poet of 'North' and 'South' (the titles of the structural divisions in The Fortunate Traveller, 1981) and of 'Here and Elsewhere' (The Arkansas Testament, 1987).1° In The Fortunate Traveller the poem, 'The Spoiler's Return', is important not only for its masterful depiction of Trinidadian Calypso culture or for its political and social satire, but also because it represents perhaps the high point of Walcott's handling of dialect in his poetry. He began experimenting with this tentatively in a few lines of poems such as the sonnet in 'Tales of the Islands' which begins: 'Poopa da' was a fete!' (p 24). It developed slowly in the poetry (although the dialogue in many of the plays was largely dialect), to the point where it has become a natural, flexible and sophisticated poetic medium in 'The Schooner Flight', which Seamus Heaney describes as 'epoch-making' precisely for this reason; he says that Walcott has discovered 'a language woven out of dialect and literature, neither folksy nor condescending . . . evolved out of one man's inherited divisions and obsessions.'" 'The Spoiler's Return' duplicates this achievement. Here is Spoiler explaining how the devil (a fan of his kaiso) has let him return to Port of Spain:

I beg him two weeks leave and he send me back up, not as no bedbug or no flea, but in this limeskin hat and floccy suit, to sing what I did always sing: the truth. Tell Desperadoes when you reach the hill, I decompose, but I composing still . . . (p432)

A feature of the latest poetry is Walcott's increasing concern with the figure of the poet, and the business of writing poetry itself. From his earliest poems his

lo The Arkansas Testament, London: Faber & Faber, 1987. ' I 'The Language of Exile', p 5.

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work was sprinkled with metaphors about writing poetry, or about the kind of poetry he sought to write, but the tendency towards a portrait of the poet writing, towards a bleak self-contemplation or self-questioning, has become marked in the latest collections. This can be seen in a poem such as 'Hotel Normandie Pool' from The Fortunate Traveller, but by the time we come to the collection entitled Mid~ummer,'~this is the mode that predominates:

At the Queen's Park Hotel, with its white, high-ceilinged rooms I reenter my first local mirror. A skidding roach In the porcelain basin slides from its path to Pamassus. Every word I have written took the wrong approach. I cannot connect these lines with the lines in my face. (p 471)

The same seems to hold true for the latest drama, as in the play A Branch of the Blue Nile (1986),13which involves characters who are playwrights and actors, and a play within a play. Perhaps this is another aspect of the autobiographical urge evident in Another Life, or part of the proliferating complexity of character or of the ambiguities at the heart of the creative urge, that Walcott himself sees so clearly in chapter 9 of the autobiographical poem.

One poem in Walcott's very latest volume, The Arkansas Testament, takes us back to the poet's undying love for islands and people that has been a constant throughout his career. It takes us back to the August epiphany in his fourteenth year, to Shabine weeping for his island, to Spoiler, coming back from Hell to try to save his beloved Trinidad. The poem is 'The Light of the World', in which the poet takes a trip with the peasants of his native St Lucia in a mini-bus. He looks around and loves them all-one woman he considers the light of the world; he is in tune with the features and rhythms of their lives, but still remains unable to participate fully, distanced by vocation, by a habit of perception. When the poet gets off at his stop the following final scene occurs:

Then, a few yards ahead, the van stopped. A man shouted my name from the transport window. I walked up towards him. He held out something. A pack of cigarettes had dropped from my pocket. He gave it to me. I turned, hiding my tears. There was nothing they wanted, nothing I could give them but this thing I have called 'The Light of the World'.

But the gift is indeed valuable, and the giver worthy. With his accumulated fame and honours, living as ever between two worlds, Walcott remains the poet of the Caribbean people, of islands and of sea.

l 2 Midsummer, London: Faber & Faber, 1984. "A Branch of the Blue Nile is included in Three Plays, New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1986.

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the poetry of seamus heaney walcott

Documents

derek walcott http

poetry http

skylight http

biography http

heaney reading bogland

derek walcott biography

poetry of seamus heaney

tollund man http