338 PART THREE
that violence with paradise, Walcott ends on the constant changing nature of
things: “the sea was still going on.”
“Sea-light on the cod barrels,” “the blue, gusting harbour,” “the cobalt bay,”
“the schooners in their stagnant smells,” “racing bitterns”: West India colors
the opening stanzas of another book-length poem, Tiepolo’s Hound, published
when Walcott was seventy. What was still driving him, after seventeen poetry
books, twenty-nine plays, essays and conversations, journalism and teaching, a
lifetime of painting, much travel, the Nobel Prize? First and last a primal urge
to get things said, “the fevered bliss that shook John Clare”: “it lies in the small
spring of poetry everywhere.” That bliss spurs a “freshness of detail” he says
“should be true of the remembered life”:
the almond ’s smell from a torn almond leaf,
the spray glazing your face from the bursting waves.Our word-sense renews a place on earth that ’s long been unrecognized for itself.
In freshening memory Walcott knows a need—historical, political, spiri-
tual—to redeem his birthright rooted in a specific place, a slender archipelago,
the Lesser Antilles, a chain of islands settled by Spain, the Netherlands, Den-
mark, France, England, America. Here as in Omeros, “The empire of naming
colonised even the trees.” (Like the “gusting harbour,” “colonised” insists on
British spelling, still loyal to the poet ’s mother tongue despite a New York
publisher.) Titling his Nobel Prize speech “The Antilles: Fragments of Epic
Memory,” he could be echoing Eliot ’s The Waste Land, “These fragments I
have shored against my ruins,” or Neruda’s epic recovery of the pre-Columbian
Andean sanctuary Machu Picchu: “This was the dwelling, this is the place,” el
sitio. Stemming from, dwelling in St. Lucia and Trinidad, Walcott will bring
those places vibrantly into the present, however fragmented their past. Poetry
“conjugates both tenses simultaneously.” Through time and memory, poems
go about remaking place.
Before introducing Tiepolo’s hound, Walcott ’s verse makes clear that place,
St. Thomas in the West Indies—that reclaiming a place of his desire has every-
thing to do with wordcraft, art, light. On page one we meet a family strolling
past a synagogue, past “small island shops / / quiet as drawings” toward “the
blue, gusting harbour” where gulls mark the waves “like commas.” “Sea-light”
strikes the cod barrels of St. Thomas, “the salt breeze brings the sound of Mission
slaves / / chanting deliverance from all their sins / in tidal couplets of lament
and answer.” Before we know it, these pentameters with their rhymes—“like
commas” / “St. Thomas,” “waves” / “slaves”—weave sea light into city trade,
salt breeze into forced religion, while coupling waves with both writing and