[New-Poetry] The poet Walcott

[Anny Ballardini]

Well, because it talks of birds, my favorite subject after the Mississippi,
be well

Anny

On Thu, May 28, 2009 at 8:18 AM, Anny Ballardini
<anny.ballardini at gmail.com>wrote:

> 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
> http://www.lulu.com/content/5806078
> http://www.moriapoetry.com/ebooks.html
> I Tell You: One must still have chaos in one to give birth to a dancing
> star!
> Friedrich Nietzsche
>
>
>


-- 
Anny Ballardini
http://annyballardini.blogspot.com/
http://www.fieralingue.it/modules.php?name=poetshome
http://www.lulu.com/content/5806078
http://www.moriapoetry.com/ebooks.html
I Tell You: One must still have chaos in one to give birth to a dancing
star!
Friedrich Nietzsche
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