The Caribbean poet Derek Walcott (1930-2017) wrote poems dense with imagery and allusion that sometimes give me the feeling of pushing my way through the undergrowth of a tropical forest: an exotic and interesting landscape but not one in which I feel entirely at home. Though he is probably best known for his long and complex epic poem ‘Omeros’ the best way into his work may be through some of his shorter lyrics, such as this week’s offering, which I take as portraying a man who has been through much and is coming to terms with age and loss by letting the burden of identity dissolve into the sea and space around him. It is a little strange, but after after a reading or two the strangeness abates to leave a calm beauty of night and stars.

‘But things must fall’: I wonder if there is an echo of scripture here, as when Jesus speaks about the end times – cf. Mark 13.25 ‘And the stars of heaven shall fall, and the powers that are in heaven shall be shaken’.

‘cotch’: Afro-Caribbean slang for to relax, hang out

‘Shabine sang to you from the depths of the sea’: Shabine is the principal figure in another, longer Walcott poem, ‘The Schooner Flight’, where he appears as a conflicted figure trying to come to terms with, or to escape from, the complexities of his mixed race heritage and his people’s colonial past. I think Shabine is clearly to a great extent a stand-in for Walcott himself, and this last line of the poem is a statement of the poet’s legacy.

After The Storm

There are so many islands!
As many islands as the stars at night
on that branched tree from which meteors are shaken
like falling fruit around the schooner Flight.
But things must fall, and so it always was,
on one hand Venus, on the other Mars;
fall, and are one, just as this earth is one
island in archipelagoes of stars.
My first friend was the sea. Now, is my last.
I stop talking now. I work, then I read,
cotching under a lantern hooked to the mast.
I try to forget what happiness was,
and when that don’t work, I study the stars.
Sometimes is just me, and the soft-scissored foam
as the deck turn white and the moon open
a cloud like a door, and the light over me
is a road in white moonlight taking me home.
Shabine sang to you from the depths of the sea.

Derek Walcott