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

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