St. James
Santiago
Botox
Almendro
Aaron
Prov.10:13
"In the lips of him that hath understanding wisdom is found: but a rod is for the back of him that is void of understanding."
Cherry almond fudge
White chocolate Bakewell (cherry and almond) fudge
Nombre de Dios is mentioned by the poet Derek Walcott in The Prodigal:
Caravels slid over the horizon.
The flags of the sea-almonds wilted
and yard-smoke drifted, forked as Drake's beard,
sacker of Nombre de Dios.—The Prodigal (p. 46)
Straying from St. Lucia
Walcott Sets His Odyssey to Poetry
The Prodigal
By Derek Walcott
October 2004
112 pp.
Farrar, Straus & Giroux
$20
By Derek Walcott
October 2004
112 pp.
Farrar, Straus & Giroux
$20
Nobel Prize-winning poet Derek Walcott's
verse memoir, The Prodigal, begins with an image of literature
set aside. A traveler places his book on the seat next to him; "he preferred
to read / the paragraphs, the gliding blocks of stanzas / framed by
the widening windows." But literature is not so much disbanded in Walcott's
masterful memoir as diffused; it becomes both the object of observation-the
landscape flashing by outside the observer's window-and the means to
capture the ephemeral image on the page.
Train travel, one might note, hardly provides an innovative mode for an author's reflection upon artistic creation, and Walcott has an expansive opus upon which to reflect, including his breakthrough collection of poems, In a Green Night (1962), Sea Grapes (1976), Midsummer (1984), and more recently, Tiepolo's Hound (2000), among other poetic and dramatic works. But Walcott is conscious of the clichéd legacy in which he operates, alluding openly to perhaps the most famous treatment of trains in all literature; "he knew, through the gliding window, the trees would lift / in lament for all the leaves of unread books, / Anna Karenina …" The allusion underlines the self-awareness that runs through The Prodigal, a self-awareness that somehow manages to avoid self-promotion. The speaker's movement towards the monuments and masterpieces of the past is inevitable but humble; he will use well-traveled routes to reach these places of pilgrimage. Literature, for Walcott, provides the pre-constructed railroad tracks, but its parallel lines are reinterpreted in his own beautiful poetic lines.
The Prodigal is composed of three parts, divided into chapters that often contain distinct narratives. "Echoing railway stations drew him to fiction," Walcott writes, accepting the inevitable draw of those familiar cathedrals of fiction. But the speaker personalizes these fictions for himself as well. One such fiction tells the story of a love affair set among the "chasms and fissures of the vertiginous Alps." The whole scene, the speaker reminisces, "was just like something he had read. / Something in boyhood before he went abroad." The love interest, "with her cold cheeks, snow smudged with strawberries / her body steaming with hues of a banked hearth," seems to complete the stereotypical alpine romance. Confronted by the snowy blankness of the mountains and the blank whiteness of the page, the speaker cannot escape narrative; "out of this snow, like weeds that have survived, / came and assiduous fiction." This self-awareness of his own creative process saves Walcott's poetry from the trite and obvious, rendering it a beautiful distillation of literary and imagistic influence.
Walcott describes images of "inns, / the gables shelved with white, the muted trails, / and (unavoidable) the sharp horn of the peak"-such images are, as he explicitly acknowledges, unavoidable. But the images are not deployed as a result of creative limitation; they illustrate the persistence of memory, "an ember's memory/ of fire, provided since my young manhood/ or earlier, of the Ice Maiden." The Ice Maiden, a Hans Christian Anderson tale, provided a bridge for the author in his "young manhood," introducing him to foreign tales and foreign climes. Now that he is a writer, it returns to him as a demonstration of the power of words and narrative.
The rapid movement from childhood to adulthood, across eras, from one end of the globe to the other, characterizes the fluid verse of The Prodigal. Relatively early in the book, the speaker describes Boston in the winter, a potentially endless state of inertia but within this description we are carried to the far reaches of Mongolia: "On Mondays, Boston classes. Lunch, a Korean corner- / My glasses clouded by a tribal broth, / a soup that tamed shaggy Mongolian horsemen / in steaming tents which their mares stamped the snow." Sharing the contemplation of morning sun on New Jersey, we are shipped to the author's home: "Blue-grey morning, sunlight shaping Jersey, / and, magisterial, a white city gliding between buildings, leaving the river for the Caribbean/ its cargo: my longing. A high, immaculate ship." The sweeping movement of the verse never feels misguided in Walcott's poetry. It is grounded by the tangible, everyday details rendered with exquisite aplomb.
However, The Prodigal does not succeed effortlessly. The self-consciousness of the writing creates its most noticeable stumbles. Active criticism enters the poetry at certain points: "You did not venture far from your hotel, / Prodigal, in your untethered pilgrimage." In some of these explicit lines of criticism, the poetry of The Prodigal loses an element of its fluidity. Perhaps Walcott includes these moments to emphasize the inevitably awkward project of self-reflection, to illustrate the moments in which consciousness rears its head to interfere with its own depiction. For example, a sarcastic voice punctures the speaker's rapturous descriptions of Genoa: "here it comes, the light / out of pearl, out of Piero della Francesca, (you could tell he would mention a painter)." The shift from first to third person, and the invocation of an external commentator distances the reader from the verse, rupturing the intimate display of the less obvious challenges facing the speaker. The passage of the prodigal to his homeland is tumultuous in its own right; these poetic shifts to a conversational criticism disrupt rather than augment the depiction of the speaker's difficult and prolonged journey home.
An additional discomfort with the verse may arise from the prevalence of love affairs, which threatens to reduce the speaker's narrative into a Don Juan-esque inventory of his personal evolution. The women involved in these affairs hardly become characters in their own right and often seem enigmatic extensions of the places themselves: "O Serbian sibyl, prophetress / peering between your curtains of brown hair/ (or these parentheses), if I were a Jew, you'd see me shuffling on the cobblestones." From these lines, it is clear that the romance is as much historical as it is personal. The affair with the "Serbian sibyl" becomes a mechanism for the speaker to understand his relation to this foreign place.
But ultimately we excuse such indulgences on Walcott's part since the poem is unapologetically and unashamedly about its speaker. An older version of the speaker reflects upon the fusion of human and history: "what was adored, / the city or its women? Aren't they the same?" At first the sentiment seems egocentric, an account of relationships focused only upon their effect upon the speaker. But, as Walcott continues, he reveals that the love that grew out of these places did not cloud the speaker's appreciation; it allowed it to blossom, reduced the anxiety of foreignness with intimacy and "a love that has no epoch, no history." This type of love allowed both his home and his travels to blend, "blent into this, whatever this thing is." The speaker has not quite identified the result of his travels, but he is tired at this late stage in his life with the constant questioning and self-consciousness that imposed itself earlier in life; it seems he's had enough of "the cracked heart and the dividing mind" which "yawn like a chasm, from too many fissures / like the blanched Alps."
With simultaneous breadth and intimacy, The Prodigal combines anxiety of influence with a joyful celebration of influence. The Prodigal can be read as a reconciliation not only between a man and his homeland, but between an author and the origin of his influence. In the later stages of life the speaker probes the origins of identity:
In The Prodigal, Walcott adeptly escapes "piebald mimicry," creating a mosaic of influence that forms something truly original.
Train travel, one might note, hardly provides an innovative mode for an author's reflection upon artistic creation, and Walcott has an expansive opus upon which to reflect, including his breakthrough collection of poems, In a Green Night (1962), Sea Grapes (1976), Midsummer (1984), and more recently, Tiepolo's Hound (2000), among other poetic and dramatic works. But Walcott is conscious of the clichéd legacy in which he operates, alluding openly to perhaps the most famous treatment of trains in all literature; "he knew, through the gliding window, the trees would lift / in lament for all the leaves of unread books, / Anna Karenina …" The allusion underlines the self-awareness that runs through The Prodigal, a self-awareness that somehow manages to avoid self-promotion. The speaker's movement towards the monuments and masterpieces of the past is inevitable but humble; he will use well-traveled routes to reach these places of pilgrimage. Literature, for Walcott, provides the pre-constructed railroad tracks, but its parallel lines are reinterpreted in his own beautiful poetic lines.
The Prodigal is composed of three parts, divided into chapters that often contain distinct narratives. "Echoing railway stations drew him to fiction," Walcott writes, accepting the inevitable draw of those familiar cathedrals of fiction. But the speaker personalizes these fictions for himself as well. One such fiction tells the story of a love affair set among the "chasms and fissures of the vertiginous Alps." The whole scene, the speaker reminisces, "was just like something he had read. / Something in boyhood before he went abroad." The love interest, "with her cold cheeks, snow smudged with strawberries / her body steaming with hues of a banked hearth," seems to complete the stereotypical alpine romance. Confronted by the snowy blankness of the mountains and the blank whiteness of the page, the speaker cannot escape narrative; "out of this snow, like weeds that have survived, / came and assiduous fiction." This self-awareness of his own creative process saves Walcott's poetry from the trite and obvious, rendering it a beautiful distillation of literary and imagistic influence.
Walcott describes images of "inns, / the gables shelved with white, the muted trails, / and (unavoidable) the sharp horn of the peak"-such images are, as he explicitly acknowledges, unavoidable. But the images are not deployed as a result of creative limitation; they illustrate the persistence of memory, "an ember's memory/ of fire, provided since my young manhood/ or earlier, of the Ice Maiden." The Ice Maiden, a Hans Christian Anderson tale, provided a bridge for the author in his "young manhood," introducing him to foreign tales and foreign climes. Now that he is a writer, it returns to him as a demonstration of the power of words and narrative.
The rapid movement from childhood to adulthood, across eras, from one end of the globe to the other, characterizes the fluid verse of The Prodigal. Relatively early in the book, the speaker describes Boston in the winter, a potentially endless state of inertia but within this description we are carried to the far reaches of Mongolia: "On Mondays, Boston classes. Lunch, a Korean corner- / My glasses clouded by a tribal broth, / a soup that tamed shaggy Mongolian horsemen / in steaming tents which their mares stamped the snow." Sharing the contemplation of morning sun on New Jersey, we are shipped to the author's home: "Blue-grey morning, sunlight shaping Jersey, / and, magisterial, a white city gliding between buildings, leaving the river for the Caribbean/ its cargo: my longing. A high, immaculate ship." The sweeping movement of the verse never feels misguided in Walcott's poetry. It is grounded by the tangible, everyday details rendered with exquisite aplomb.
However, The Prodigal does not succeed effortlessly. The self-consciousness of the writing creates its most noticeable stumbles. Active criticism enters the poetry at certain points: "You did not venture far from your hotel, / Prodigal, in your untethered pilgrimage." In some of these explicit lines of criticism, the poetry of The Prodigal loses an element of its fluidity. Perhaps Walcott includes these moments to emphasize the inevitably awkward project of self-reflection, to illustrate the moments in which consciousness rears its head to interfere with its own depiction. For example, a sarcastic voice punctures the speaker's rapturous descriptions of Genoa: "here it comes, the light / out of pearl, out of Piero della Francesca, (you could tell he would mention a painter)." The shift from first to third person, and the invocation of an external commentator distances the reader from the verse, rupturing the intimate display of the less obvious challenges facing the speaker. The passage of the prodigal to his homeland is tumultuous in its own right; these poetic shifts to a conversational criticism disrupt rather than augment the depiction of the speaker's difficult and prolonged journey home.
An additional discomfort with the verse may arise from the prevalence of love affairs, which threatens to reduce the speaker's narrative into a Don Juan-esque inventory of his personal evolution. The women involved in these affairs hardly become characters in their own right and often seem enigmatic extensions of the places themselves: "O Serbian sibyl, prophetress / peering between your curtains of brown hair/ (or these parentheses), if I were a Jew, you'd see me shuffling on the cobblestones." From these lines, it is clear that the romance is as much historical as it is personal. The affair with the "Serbian sibyl" becomes a mechanism for the speaker to understand his relation to this foreign place.
But ultimately we excuse such indulgences on Walcott's part since the poem is unapologetically and unashamedly about its speaker. An older version of the speaker reflects upon the fusion of human and history: "what was adored, / the city or its women? Aren't they the same?" At first the sentiment seems egocentric, an account of relationships focused only upon their effect upon the speaker. But, as Walcott continues, he reveals that the love that grew out of these places did not cloud the speaker's appreciation; it allowed it to blossom, reduced the anxiety of foreignness with intimacy and "a love that has no epoch, no history." This type of love allowed both his home and his travels to blend, "blent into this, whatever this thing is." The speaker has not quite identified the result of his travels, but he is tired at this late stage in his life with the constant questioning and self-consciousness that imposed itself earlier in life; it seems he's had enough of "the cracked heart and the dividing mind" which "yawn like a chasm, from too many fissures / like the blanched Alps."
With simultaneous breadth and intimacy, The Prodigal combines anxiety of influence with a joyful celebration of influence. The Prodigal can be read as a reconciliation not only between a man and his homeland, but between an author and the origin of his influence. In the later stages of life the speaker probes the origins of identity:
Since I am what I am, how was I made?
To scribe complexion to the intellect
is not an insult, since it takes its plaid
like the invaluable lizard from its background,
and if our work is piebald mimicry,
then virtue lies in its variety
to be adept.
In The Prodigal, Walcott adeptly escapes "piebald mimicry," creating a mosaic of influence that forms something truly original.
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