[New-Poetry] The poet Walcott

[Anny Ballardini]

This is a wonderful poem, thank you.

On Thu, May 28, 2009 at 3:52 AM, Bob Grumman <bobgrumman at nut-n-but.net>wrote:

>  David Graham wrote:
>
> Walcott's got many strings on his lyre, and it's probably true that he's
> better at longer pieces and dramatic ones than brief lyrics, in my view.
>  For good or ill, Walcott's a Romantic, I'd say, and one of his most
> frequent weaknesses is a tendency toward purple rhetoric, a lushness that
> obscures rather than delights.   Of course, like anyone his age who
> publishes a lot, there is a lot of lesser work to be found.  But the best
> poems are very fine indeed.  A longer poem like "The Schooner Flight," in
> *The Star-Apple Kingdom* is as good as anything out there, to my eyes.
>
>  Here's the final poem in his book *The Fortunate Traveller*, which I
> think is as good a representative shorter lyric as any.
>
>  *The Season of Phantasmal Peace*
>
> Then all the nations of birds lifted together
> the huge net of the shadows of this earth
> in multitudinous dialects, twittering tongues,
> stitching and crossing it. They lifted up
> the shadows of long pines down trackless slopes,
> the shadows of glass-faced towers down evening streets,
> the shadow of a frail plant on a city sill --
> the net rising soundless at night, the birds' cries soundless, until
> there was no longer dusk, or season, decline, or weather,
> only this passage of phantasmal light
> that not the narrowest shadow dared to sever.
>
> And men could not see, looking up, what the wild geese drew,
> what the ospreys trailed behind them in the silvery ropes
> that flashed in the icy sunlight; they could not hear
> battalions of starlings waging peaceful cries,
> bearing the net higher, covering this world
> like the vines of an orchard, or a mother drawing
> the trembling gauze over the trembling eyes
> of a child fluttering to sleep;
>                                                it was the light
> that you will see at evening on the side of a hill
> in yellow October, and no one hearing knew
> what change had brought into the raven's cawing,
> the killdeer's screech, the ember-circling chough
> such an immense, soundless, and high concern
> for the fields and cities where the birds belong,
> except it was their seasonal passing, Love,
> made seasonless, or, from the high privilege of their birth,
> something brighter than pity for the wingless ones
> below them who shared dark holes in windows and in houses,
> and higher they lifted the net with soundless voices
> above all change, betrayals of falling suns,
> and this season lasted one moment, like the pause
> between dusk and darkness, between fury and peace,
> but, for such as our earth is now, it lasted long.
>
> -- Derek Walcott.  *The Fortunate Traveller.*  Farrar, Straus, Giroux,
> 1981.
>
> Thanks, David.  I feel I followed it, but I sure didn't get anything from
> it.  He seems to me to be describing a pure fantasy--unlike the Wright poem
> about the horse (which I like, you--I believe--don't).  Wright experienced a
> moment of high euphoria from an experience of something real, Walcott here
> (as far as I can make out) invents an occurrence and tells us it was
> important.  I dunno, I just come out of the poem wondering what he was
> talking about (birds' seasonal migration can't be it, surely).  And while
> there are a few minor felicities of diction and nothing wrong with the other
> words in the poem, nothing's there that's close to most of Yeats's many
> poems that seem in the same vein to me.
>
> --Bob
>
>
>
>
>
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-- 
Anny Ballardini
http://annyballardini.blogspot.com/
http://www.fieralingue.it/modules.php?name=poetshome
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I Tell You: One must still have chaos in one to give birth to a dancing
star!
Friedrich Nietzsche
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