Archives - Literature: Page 4
Author: paul carson (Wed Apr 25, 2007 12:21 pm)
Title: Poetry BY DEREK WALCOTT
By WILLIAM LOGAN
Poets behave like conquistadors wherever they roam, picking up a new verse form, a lover, some inventive cursing, a disease. Would Byron have been Byron without Italy and Greece? What would Eliot and Pound have become without the hostility of London? Can we imagine Hart Crane without the Caribbean or Elizabeth Bishop without Rio? Derek Walcott has crossed so many borders, his poems read like a much-thumbed Baedeker. To a boy born on St. Lucia, the rhythms and intonations of English verse were a passport to the elsewhere; but they came with a burden — the language of the colonial masters was not the one caught in his ear at home. “How choose,” he wrote, “Between this Africa and the English tongue I love? / Betray them both, or give back what they give?”
SELECTED POEMS
By Derek Walcott. Edited by Edward Baugh.
Selected Poems” begins with poems of disturbing self-confidence — amused, self-mocking, mildly self-hating, his youthful work is filled with language that eases itself off the tongue (if some tongues are silver, his must be platinum). A powerful maker of phrases from the start, he adopted the English of an empire that, having once painted the map red, was slowly being dismantled: the ruins of a great house, “Whose moth-like girls are mixed with candledust, / Remain to file the lizard’s dragonish claws. / The mouths of those gate cherubs shriek with stain.”
Walcott had barely been noticed before he became noted. By his mid 30s, he was composing a verse autobiography (an act of hubris akin to a pop star writing his life at 19). “Another Life” (1973) is a pretentious, pressure-cooker affair, a tour de force fatally uneasy with itself. (Surely you give a few hostages to describe yourself as a prodigy, even if a “prodigy of the wrong age and colour.”) At times it reads like “The Prelude” by a writer far more elegant than Wordsworth, though almost every line about the poet himself sounds false:
Afternoon light ripened the valley,
rifling smoke climbed from small labourers’ houses,
and I dissolved into a trance.
I was seized by a pity more profound
than my young body could bear, I climbed with the labouring smoke,
I drowned in labouring breakers of bright cloud,
then uncontrollably I began to weep,
inwardly, without tears, with a serene extinction
of all sense; I felt compelled to kneel,
I wept for nothing and for everything.
This idea of compassion requires a lot of scenery-chewing. (One hopes the houses were small, not the laborers.)
Most poets compromise between the diction of the poems they love, often centuries old, and the language they hear in the streets (the tin-eared poems in island patois have been among Walcott’s least successful); but, for the exile, language is a daily form of betrayal. Walcott has remained a figure of divided loyalties and a double tongue — his grandmothers were descended from slaves, his grandfathers white. Though he “prayed / nightly for his flesh to change, / his dun flesh peeled white,” like any young man of parts he was somewhat enamored of himself. Even the late verse can seem shallow and narcissistic, beauty seized in his own beautiful eye — he treats women (“O Beauty, you are the light of the world!”) in a manner closer to lechery than to old-style courtesy. Caught between two races and two worlds, he has sometimes succumbed to pride or self-pity, or to that pride indistinguishable from self-pity.
Although his taste for the sententious remark has never quite abated (“To change your language you must change your life,” “There is no harder prison than writing verse”), Walcott grew able to tame the rhetoric that, like a forest fire, occasionally roared out of control. He became the most striking poet of seascapes since Coleridge (between them lie only a few lines in “The Waste Land”), rivaling the older poet’s sense of the uncanny.
I saw men with rusty eyeholes like cannons,
and whenever their half-naked crews cross the sun,
right through their tissue, you traced their bones
like leaves against the sunlight; frigates, barquentines,
the backward-moving current swept them on,
and high on their decks I saw great admirals,
Rodney, Nelson, de Grasse.
This is no mere practiced and prettified version of “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” — later poets learn their craft from earlier; but they must provide the originality themselves, in resistance to what they learn.
Walcott’s most fluid and achieved work lies in the books from “Sea Grapes” (1976) through “The Arkansas Testament” (1987), where a mature intelligence no longer wrestles with language like an Antaeus, but subdues it by being subdued. “Midsummer” (1984) long seemed to me the exception, a laggard book of hours by an author too often at his desk. Reading the selection here, I realize I missed something. Without the shape of the lyric subject, Walcott’s poetry becomes the registration of sensibility — and in texture and sensibility he has been a master, even if the redolently patterned verse has sometimes been laid down like linoleum. Overstuffed with images, his languid, occasionally lackadaisical style is more in love with words than with what they represent. He’s a better poet when just mulling things over, in a louche beachcomber-ish way — when he talks politics, the taste seems bitter in his mouth.
William Logan is a poet and critic whose most recent books are “The Whispering Gallery” and “The Undiscovered Country.”
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grow and be kind