Derek Walcott

[the green fairy]

Dear book worms,

For one of my university classes in France, I have to work on some of Derek Walcott's poems.
Poetry is not my favorite genre and I am having some terrible difficulties to figure things out. I really appreciate Walcott's work but honestly it is really hard to capture the essence of it.
Is there anyone who could give me a hand in anylising some of them, please?
"In a Green Night"
" The Castaway"
"The Swamp"

Thank you in advance.

[quasimodo1]

Becune Point



Stunned heat of noon. In shade, tan, silken cows
hide in the thorned acacias. A butterfly staggers.

Stamping their hooves from thirst, small horses drowse
or whinny for water. On parched, ochre headlands,
daggers


of agave bristle in primordial defense,
like a cornered monster backed up against the sea.


A mongoose charges dry grass and fades through a fence
faster than an afterthought. Dust rises easily.


Haze of the Harmattan, Sahara dust, memory’s haze
from the dried well of Africa, the headland’s desert


or riders in swirling burnooses, mixed with the greys
of hills veiled in Impressionist light. We inherit

two worlds of associations, or references, drought
that we heighten into Delacroix’s North Africa,


veils, daggers, lances, herds the Harmattan brought
with a phantom inheritance, which the desperate seeker


of a well-spring staggers in the heat in search of—
heroic ancestors; the other that the dry season brings


is the gust of a European calendar, but it is the one love
that thirsts for confirmations in the circling rings


of the ground dove’s cooing on stones, in the acacia’s
thorns and the agave’s daggers, that they are all ours,


the white horsemen of the Sahara, India’s and Asia’s
plumed mongoose and crested palmtree, Benin and
Pontoise.


We are history’s afterthought, as the mongoose races
ahead of its time; in drought we discover our shadows,


our origins that range from the most disparate places,
from the dugouts of Guinea to the Nile’s canted dhows. ... {PART I]

[quasimodo1]

The Bounty


[for Alix Walcott]


i


Between the vision of the Tourist Board and the true
Paradise lies the desert where Isaiah’s elations
force a rose from the sand. The thirty-third canto


cores the dawn clouds with concentric radiance,
the breadfruit opens its palms in praise of the bounty,
bois-pain, tree of bread, slave food, the bliss of John Clare,


torn, wandering Tom, stoat-stroker in his county
of reeds and stalk-crickets, fiddling the dank air,
lacing his boots with vines, steering glazed beetles


with the tenderest prods, knight of the cockchafer,
wrapped in the mists of shires, their snail-horned steeples
palms opening to the cupped pool—but his soul safer


than ours, though iron streams fetter his ankles.
Frost whitening his stubble, he stands in the ford
of a brook like the Baptist lifting his branches to bless


cathedrals and snails, the breaking of this new day,
and the shadows of the beach road near which my mother lies,
with the traffic of insects going to work anyway.


The lizard on the white wall fixed on the hieroglyph
of its stone shadow, the palms’ rustling archery,
the souls and sails of circling gulls rhyme with:


“In la sua volont è nostra pace,”
In His will is our peace. Peace in white harbours,
in marinas whose masts agree, in crescent melons


left all night in the fridge, in the Egyptian labours
of ants moving boulders of sugar, words in this sentence,
shadow and light, who live next door like neighbours,


and in sardines with pepper sauce. My mother lies
near the white beach stones, John Clare near the sea-almonds,
yet the bounty returns each daybreak, to my surprise,


to my surprise and betrayal, yes, both at once.
I am moved like you, mad Tom, by a line of ants;
I behold their industry and they are giants. {part one of seven part poem}

[quasimodo1]

Codicil

Schizophrenic, wrenched by two styles,
one a hack's hired prose, I earn
me exile. I trudge this sickle, moonlit beach for

miles,

tan, burn
to slough off
this live of ocean that's self-love.

To change your language you must change your

life.

I cannot right old wrongs.
Waves tire of horizon and return.
Gulls screech with rusty tongues

Above the beached, rotting pirogues,
they were a venomous beaked cloud at

Charlotteville.

One I thought love of country was enough,
now, even if I chose, there is no room at the trough.

I watch the best minds rot like dogs
for scraps of flavour.
I am nearing middle
age, burnt skin
peels from my hand like paper, onion-thin,
like Peer Gynt's riddle.

At heart there is nothing, not the dread
of death. I know to many dead.
They're all familiar, all in character,

even how they died. ... {excerpt}

[quasimodo1]

The Sea is History



Where are your monuments, your battles, martyrs?
Where is your tribal memory? Sirs,
in that grey vault. The sea. The sea
has locked them up. The sea is History.

First, there was the heaving oil,
heavy as chaos;
then, like a light at the end of a tunnel,

the lantern of a caravel,
and that was Genesis.
Then there were the packed cries,
the ****, the moaning:

Exodus.
Bone soldered by coral to bone,
mosaics
mantled by the benediction of the shark's shadow,

that was the Ark of the Covenant.
Then came from the plucked wires
of sunlight on the sea floor

the plangent harps of the Babylonian bondage,
as the white cowries clustered like manacles
on the drowned women,

and those were the ivory bracelets
of the Song of Solomon,
but the ocean kept turning blank pages

looking for History.
Then came the men with eyes heavy as anchors
who sank without tombs,

brigands who barbecued cattle,
leaving their charred ribs like palm leaves on the shore,
then the foaming, rabid maw

of the tidal wave swallowing Port Royal,
and that was Jonah,
but where is your Renaissance?

Sir, it is locked in them sea-sands
out there past the reef's moiling shelf,
where the men-o'-war floated down;

strop on these goggles, I'll guide you there myself.
It's all subtle and submarine,
through colonnades of coral,

past the gothic windows of sea-fans
to where the crusty grouper, onyx-eyed,
blinks, weighted by its jewels, like a bald queen;

and these groined caves with barnacles
pitted like stone
are our cathedrals,

and the furnace before the hurricanes:
Gomorrah. Bones ground by windmills
into marl and cornmeal,

and that was Lamentations—
that was just Lamentations,
it was not History; ... {excerpt}

[quasimodo1]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2008/oct/04/poetry.derekwalcott Article and Interview, by James Cambell "You promised me Poetry"