Another of Derek Walcott’s intriguing shorter lyrics, this one apparently on the theme of finding peace and healing after a failed relationship, or perhaps more than one failed relationship (Walcott was divorced three times), by learning to embrace oneself rather than another, and thus at last becoming self-sufficient in one’s own identity.

Looked at from this angle, the sentiment of the poem seems debatable. Surely if there is one thing that most of us, and perhaps especially poets, are not short on it is self-love, and maybe those failed relationships wouldn’t fail so readily were it not so.

But there may be another way of interpreting the poem. The fact is that poets, perhaps more than most of us, live with the perpetual fret of not having world enough and time, to love all that they would wish to love and be all that they would wish to be, and I think these lines can also be taken as a reassurance that this state of self-dissatisfaction can have an end, that there may wait for us a final contentment, a time to reap what we have sown. ‘Sit. Feast on your life.’ Well, it’s a nice idea. Me, I’m still fretting.

Love After Love

The time will come
when, with elation
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror
and each will smile at the other’s welcome,

and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.

Derek Walcott