This research work on Derek Walcott’s Poetry is Qualitative research which is descriptive in its literary form. Its objective is to portray the water imagery. The other aspects discussed in this
research are the link between sea (water) and history. Walcott had a bitter experience with history. He is of the opinion that he was plucked from his roots and thrown away in West Indies because
of which he suffered from identity crises. This research seeks to identify how Walcott self consciously uses water animals, water imagery and the significance of sea with its relationship with history in his collection of poems The Star-Apple Kingdom (1979).Walcott was an elated and enthusiastic poet passionately in love with English. He was one of the resilient diasporic Caribbean writers. Derek Walcott was born on a small island in St. Lucia in 1930 and spent almost whole of his life writing about the sea.
This thesis is divided into four chapters. First chapter includes introduction to the topic of the thesis. The second chapter includes literature review. The third chapter deals with the
relationship of sea and history while the fourth and the last chapter deals with the water imagery and how Walcott associates Sea and history with each other. This thesis tends to prove that
Walcott relates sea and history and also he uses a lot of water imagery in in his collection of poems The Star Apple Kingdom.
Chapter No: One INTRODUCTION
This research intends to critically review and scrutinize Derek Walcott’s literary work focusing on the genre of poetry. Poetry is the writing that forms a concentrated imaginative consciousness of experience in language pegged and arranged to conceive a distinct emotional response through its context, sound and cadence.
Poetry is closely packed and a brief form of literature in which the poet conveys to us his thoughts in an efficient way. Poetry is brief and has a quality to convey voluminous information to us. Poetry is a form of literature which is interpreted differently by every person. Poetry usually has multiple meanings i.e. apparent meaning as well as the underlying meaning. The only reason of choosing Walcott’s poetry other than the huge collection of his literary works was his different and strong style, lyrical quality of his poems and excellent use of imagery in his poetry. The ground of selecting poetry was that I would have freedom of expression accordingly; keeping in mind the actual meaning of poetry that would help me to justify my contention for this research.
The research work that I am going to carry out plans to construe the water imagery used in this collection of poems The Star-Apple Kingdom by Derek Walcott and the connection of sea and history depicted in Walcott’s poems. Walcott makes use of water imagery throughout the poems in his collection named The Star-Apple Kingdom.
The Star-Apple Kingdom consists of Derek’s most popular and most autobiographical sea poem, The Schooner Flight which clearly shows his passionate love for the beauty of island and an intense and indispensable love for the sea. In his collection The Sea Is History he eulogizes the sea as an important principle of civilization and memory. In Walcott’s collection The Star-Apple Kingdom he is mostly discussing sea and history and many beautiful images.
This research work aims to detect the deep rooted meanings in the imagery used by Walcott in his collection of poems mentioned earlier and also determines the connection between history and sea. Walcott is a post colonial writer who highlighted and stressed upon work on multiracialism, psychosis of dividedness, cultural shift, identity crises and various other post colonial concerns.
Walcott is one of the most realistic Caribbean writers. He has certain “mulatto ambivalence” towards political and allegiances to Caribbean problems. He received noble prize in literature and is currently working as a professor of poetry at the University of Essex.
Some of his most famous works are Omeros (1990), Dream on Monkey Mountain, Collected poems (1986), The Cast Away, The Gulf, Sea Grapes and many more. Other than noble prize he also won many other awards like Genius award, a Royal Society award, The Queens Model for poetry, and 2011 T.S Eliot’s prize for his book of poetry, White Egrets. Walcott has a very powerfully built relationship with history. He always sensed that he had been plucked from his roots and thrown in a place where he is left historyless. He has suffered almost throughout his life with identity crisis. He felt that by displacing him from his roots he lost his identity and can neither call himself, African nor European. Walcott has spoken a lot of times about his rational identity in his poems which seemed to have been deformed due to the suffering that Caribbean’s had to face due to the clash between black consciousness and the white mask. The colonizers have ill-treated and suppressed Caribbean for many years to enlighten them but in this course of time they left them with the realization of being uprooted, lost and historyless. Walcott in his work stressed upon the difference between the colonizers and the colonized.
Walcott’s literary work is heavily under the influence or effect of post colonialism. His poetry is a real depiction of the dilemma and reminiscence of the modern post independent Caribbean for whom not even the blue waters bring any hope of betterment but a sense of loss is still there. The dominators have left those dominated but still they were under the rule of their own people having powers. Walcott’s poetry persistently wails the sense of historylessness and loss of identity of the modern Caribbean man who seems to be rootless, having no identity even after getting freedom from the rulers i.e. colonizers.
The Oxford dictionary of English suggests that imagery is:
Language that produces pictures in the minds of people reading or listening: poetic imagery (Oxford Advance Learner’s Dictionary 774).
According to Wikipedia imagery in a literary text, is an author’s use of vivid and descriptive language to add depth to his or her work.
Good poetry is full of imagery. The reader can actually imagine hearing, touching or seeing the things described. Walcott made a lot of use of imagery in his poems. He uses imagery to depict a lot of hidden deep rooted meanings. In The Star-Apple Kingdom, Walcott fused an undaunted narrative voice with the reminiscent imagery of his native Caribbean. Walcott uses a reasonable style to examine the cultural divisions of race and language in Caribbean.
Walcott started writing at a very early age. He has been writing poems from his teenage. He just got meliorated with time and his poetry and writing became more polished since he wrote the Collected Poems (1984). Derek made a lot use of imagery in his poems. The Star-Apple Kingdom is full of water imagery. For example he uses Sea, Sea animals most frequently in this collection and uses many other images related to water.
Another aspect of this research is the relationship of sea and history according to Derek Walcott. The Sea Is History from The Star-Apple Kingdom is one of his illustrious poems. As the title suggests Derek Walcott considered Sea having a momentous relationship with history. Walcott wrote mostly about Caribbean’s, born near islands. He had an association with water which we can see in most of his writings. Water is universal symbol of commute, is usually present at turning points in story. Since water is often a sign mark of life, usually water represents life. Water can also be categorized as fresh water and polluted water. Water also typifies cleansing and purity. Water is sometimes also interpreted as thirst for something specific, such as enlightenment and knowledge. Due to its immensity the ocean is a sign of strength and power dominating all other symbol of water. The ocean is also known for being beautifully calm and sometimes for its unpredictable storms which is referred to God’s tear or the sorrow; a place where you leave your sadness and bad memories. The ocean is sometimes also known for hope, truth and in some cases as mystery and magic. Sea is part of vast ocean. The sea is powerful and often appears in the dreams. Water is associated with femininity and in a dream may represent the feminine aspect of one’s personality. Sea is often stormy, life giving and chaotic. Water also symbolizes the soul or unconsciousness.
The poem The Sea Is History establishes a connection between Walcott’s present conditions to his past by introducing Caribbean’s genesis. The Sea Is History shows an element of forlornness .Walcott has some identity and culture division issues. Europeans usurped the rights of West Indies and forced them to lead a life full of misery. Europeans displaced Africans from their roots their home land and brought them to place which did not belong to them. Europeans in the consideration of making these black people more sophisticated nearly demolished their history and past. Europeans treated blacks brutally and enslaved them. The blacks were disillusioned about their identity whether they belonged to Africa or West Indies. The West Indies could not adjust themselves in the new place where they were thrown by colonizers. Walcott was a West Indies and had the same concerns as other West Indians striving hard to realize and understand what their real identity is.
This research work aims at analyzing Derek Walcott’s poems keeping in view the relationship of history and sea in the context of The Schooner Flight in chapter three. The purpose is also to understand water imagery and relationship of history and sea in the context of the remaining poems of The Star-Apple Kingdom in the fourth and last chapter. Walcott considered himself and other West Indians historyless. The Europeans displaced the black people with the reason that they were doing this for the betterment of the black people. The Europeans took black people’s past from them according to Walcott. He was of the opinion that he has been uprooted from his soil, his home land and placed in an unknown place. Walcott is of the opinion that he doesn’t belong to West Indies; he has been displaced from his original homeland. Walcott considers himself and other West Indians historyless, having no past. Walcott faces identity crisis; he was lost somewhere between European culture and African culture. Walcott had been a sufferer and victim of multiculturalism. Walcott had Black blood and white legacy
The Caribbean identity is said to be a going process of rejuvenation where the natives are not sure of their identity and are going through a feeling of unease. Walcott uses water imagery in his poems frequently. Water is something he discusses through his collection of poetry. He uses a lot of water imagery in The Schooner Flight and also animal imagery can be seen in the poem throughout. He uses “Sea” in his poems frequently like he says in The Schooner Flight,
“I am just a red nigger who loves the sea.” (Walcott 346)
Similarly he uses the names of different water animals like crabs, sharks, bullfrog fish and many other animals. As he writes in the poem The Sea Is History,
“then came the bullfrog bellowing for a vote.”(Walcott 367)
Chapter No: Two LITERATURE REVIEW
Derek Walcott is not only the leading poet of the Caribbean; he is probably the most significant writer that the English speaking Caribbean has ever produced. Born in St. Lucia in 1930, he chose to remain in the Caribbean during late fifties and early sixties, when a large number of the contemporaries were busily making their way to the motherland, Britain.
Walcott describes his first venture into publication;
I went to my mother and said, “I’d like to publish a book of poems, and I think it’s going to cost me two hundred dollars.”She was just a seamstress and a school teacher, and I remember her being very upset…. (qtd. in Nobody's Nation: Reading Derek Walcott 17)
Walcott was born into a world that has been divided by colonialism. Derek’s writing has an influence of post colonialism. Walcott wanted to rewrite history in order to reflect the true picture of Caribbean legacy that has been demolished by colonizers. Walcott states;
Break a vase, and the love that reassembles the fragments is stronger than that love which took its symmetry for granted when it was whole. (qtd. in nobelprize n.pag)
Derek Walcott is a native English speaker, second generation immigrant and a Methodist.
Walcott explains in his famous book,
The West Indian poet is faced with a language he hears but cannot write because there are no such symbols for such language….(qtd. in The Muse of History 13)
In an interview Walcott expressed himself as follow shows the effect of being colonized which we can see also in The Star Apple Kingdom;
So if you ask me about how I feel if I’m reviewed, I think I’ve had a parallel equivalent, politically I have been through, in my life, an identical series of phases which would be that of being a colonial… (qtd. in postcolonialstudies n. pg)
In an interview with Ed Hirsch Walcott said about English language as Walcott was very fond of English language and Europe but he also had this in his mind that he belongs to his own land i.e Caribbean;
The English language is nobody's special property. It is the property of the imagination: it is the property of the language itself.(qtd. in poemhunter n. pag)
An American Social theorist C. Wright Mills wrote about Walcott:
Walcott’s work gives us a glimpse of the making of contemporary Caribbean dilemmas and struggles in identity making in a context of a colonial legacy of global socio-economic and political inequalities. (qtd. in ejournals n. pag)
Walcott’s Diasporic identity has impressions on his literary work as well. Walcott exclaimed about this in his work Meanings (1970) as:
I am a kind of split writer; I have one tradition inside me going in one way, and another going another. The mimetic, the narrative, and dance element is strong on one side, and the literary, the classical tradition is strong on the other.(qtd. in ejournals n. pg)
Hammer was of the following opinion as Walcott was divided between his own homeland, Europe and also a totally alien land West indies:
Walcott is a living example of the divided loyalties and hatreds that keep his society suspended between two worlds. (qtd. in encyclopedia n. pag)
Walcott has a great attachment to history as he was of the opinion that his history has been lost and he frequently tries to relate sea with history because sea was something near he was born, himself states:
I needed to become omnivorous about the art and literature of Europe to understand my own world. I write my own world because I had no doubt that it was mine that it was given to me, by God, not by History, with my gift. (qtd. in Studies in Postcolonial Literature 5)
Derek Walcott has always been a poet of great verbal sources, Joseph Brodsky pointed out Walcott’s descriptive powers are “truly epic”. Rarely does a critic of Derek Walcott’s poetry fail to mention his excellent command of the English. Walcott has a great command over language and also uses a lot of imagery in The Star Apple Kingdom John Figueroa describes Walcott as:
an aficionado of English English. (qtd. in jstor.org n. pag)
The colonizers mistreated the Caribbean’s. Walcott is of the opinion that suppression of colonizers has led his nation schizophrenic. He himself says:
In that simple schizophrenic boyhood one could lead two lives: the interior life of poetry, the outward life of action and dialect (qtd. in Come Back to Me My Language: Poetry and the West Indies 59)
Joseph Brodsky lends support to Derek Walcott by stating:
A true poet does not avoid influences and continuities but frequently nurtures them….Fear of influence, fear of independence, is the fear the affliction of a savage, but not of culture, which is all continuity, all echo. (qtd. in Problems in Modern Latin American History: Sources and Interpretations 42)
Walcott beautifully uses imagery in his poetry and has a very excellent style of writing poetry and infusing imagery in it, Edward Baugh also states that:
reading Walcott is also an adventure in poetic form and style
(qtd. in Our Savage Art: Poetry and the Civil Tongue 43,44)
William Logan, a poet and critic states:
For more than half a century he has served as our poet of exile – a man almost without a country…. in flight for himself. (qtd. in The poet of Exile n. pag)
Walcott also incorporated Creole into his poetry .John Thieme states:
Walcott moves easily across illusory linguistic, literary and social fault lines with his use of both Standard English and Creole (qtd. in freepatentsonline n. pag)
Derek Walcott is a Caribbean writer. Brodsky says:
Walcott has ‘Immortalized’ the Caribbean by giving it “a status of lyrical reality’. (qtd. in Derek Walcott 28)
William Logan a poet and critic said:
Derek Walcott has crossed so many borders, his poems read like a much – thumbed Baedeker. To a boy born on St. Lucia, the rhythms and intonations of English verse were a passport to the elsewhere; but they came with a burden... (qtd. in The Poet of Exile n. pag)
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