Derek Walcott's poetry: Language as betrayal

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?" Walcott's new "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.

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.

The colonized, decolonized islands, victims of what Walcott calls "the leprosy of empire," have been taken up by scholars in subaltern studies, postcolonial studies and studies whose very names are subject to rancorous argument. If he had not invented himself, academia would have had to invent him. In condensed form, Walcott believes that the British Empire was bad, except where it was good, and English literature good, except where it was bad.

Many critics see Walcott's major achievement as "Omeros" (1990), a version of the Homeric epics translated to the Caribbean, the Trojan War reimagined as a struggle between two fishermen, Achille and Hector, over a woman named Helen.

Despite imperious passages of broken terza rima, this epic of nearly 8,000 lines is spoiled by its clumsy narration, the black characters bloated with the poet's ambition, the white no more than ludicrous caricatures. Whether describing a man's scar "puckered like the corolla/of a sea-urchin" or an egret that "stabs and stabs the mud with one lifting foot," Walcott never met a metaphor he didn't like.

Walcott's most frequently announced emotion is joy, a joy that rarely seems joyous - his eye lacks nothing but a touch of sympathy. He has become a man for whom introspection never seems natural, though perhaps we've had too many poets confessing every sin under the sun (Walcott has none of Lowell's ravaging candor or unsettling mildness).

He started as a painter, his failure likely the making of him as a poet; but the words sometimes seem mere daubs, skillfully pushed around the canvas while the pictures remain dead at the center.

In the years since his Nobel Prize, Walcott's work has been haunted by the dissolutions of mortality - "The Prodigal" (2004), his most recent book, sounds exhausted in its exits. He seems almost unmoved when taking the roll call of the dead, even when writing of the death of his twin brother; but when that reserve almost breaks down, as in his elegy for Joseph Brodsky, it produces some of his finest poems:

The last leaves fell like notes from a piano
and left their ovals echoing in the ear;
with gawky music stands, the winter forest
looks like an empty orchestra, its lines
ruled on these scattered manuscripts of snow.

These self-devouring figures, turning the toolkit of poetry into metaphor (the cane fields are "set in stanzas," his "ocean kept turning blank pages"), speak to something almost unsaid - writing was Walcott's escape from the islands. The metaphors whisper their quiet acknowledgment of guilt.

Few poets have been lavished with greater gifts than Walcott; but much of his later work has been unadventurous (and undistilled), full of stock passages and stale opinions. He arrived at a few views when young and has trotted them out ever since. There are always marvelous passages, passages most poets would sell their souls for; but there are too many pages whose marvels have become all too routine.

The poetry of exile begins in sorrow. No matter how awful Rome, the Black Sea will never seem like home (when you have to go home, the landscape is what has to take you in). Walcott has captured his islands with a lushness and richness rare in our poetry - the outposts of empire once seemed as strange as Kipling's India or Bishop's Brazil. If air travel has brought them closer, it has brought their tragedies closer as well. For more than half a century Walcott has served as our poet of exile - a man almost without a country, unless the country lies wherever he has landed, in flight from himself.

William Logan is a poet and critic whose most recent books are "The Whispering Gallery" and "The Undiscovered Country."

By William Logan
Published in the New York Times, Friday, April 6, 2007