Abandoning Dead
Metaphors: The Caribbean Phase of Derek Walcott’s Poetry,
by Patricia Ismond (UWI Press, 309 pp, ISBN 976-640-107-1)
Review by Nicholas Laughlin
First
published in the Trinidad and Tobago Review, March 2003
Derek Walcott is our indispensable poet.
A.J. Seymour’s gracious poems came earlier; Martin Carter’s
have occasionally, at moments of public crisis, seemed more
immediately apt; Kamau Brathwaite’s ancestral rhythms appeal
more viscerally to some. But Walcott, since the appearance
of his first major works in the 1960s, has been indisputably
foremost among his peers: genuinely popular with the reading
public, quoted in the speeches of politicians and priests
alike, and an overshadowing influence on two succeeding
generations of English-speaking Caribbean poets. Naturally,
he has been solidly popular in the lecture-rooms and
courtyards of the academies also: his poems, plays, and
essays have made a substantial seam for our professors’
excavations; it’s a little surprising to discover, in the
early pages of Abandoning Dead Metaphors, that forty
years of scholarly burrowing have turned up, until now, only
four book-length studies of Walcott’s work.
In the ranks of the Walcott scholars, Patricia Ismond has
marched at a uniquely steadfast pace. A glance through her
bibliography reveals that her first paper on his poems was
published as long ago as 1971. She has been recognised as a
leading Walcott expert for more than a quarter-century; in
my UWI days, the undergraduates whispered, half in awe,
about the ferocity of her devotion, and she herself cracked
the occasional joke about it in her otherwise rigorous
tutorials. Ismond’s colleagues have long awaited the
publication of this major study, a scrupulous,
finely-detailed analysis of the poems of what she calls
Walcott’s Caribbean phase, starting with the prodigy’s
juvenilia in 25 Poems (1948) and proceeding through
In a Green Night (1962), The Castaway (1965),
The Gulf (1970), Sea Grapes (1976), and The
Star-Apple Kingdom (1979), lingering especially over Another
Life (1973), his great autobiographical long poem.
Soon after The Star-Apple Kingdom, Walcott accepted
a teaching position in the United States, and what you might
call the international phase of his career was launched: a
rise to fame, financial success, the laurels of the Swedish
Academy. From The Fortunate Traveller (1981)
onwards, Walcott’s poetry reflected his residence outside
the Caribbean and his increasing engagement with the wider
world; this is the poetry best known to foreign critics and
readers. Ismond’s intent is to refocus our “proper
appreciation” on Walcott’s formative earlier work, “the
place where he pursues the revolutionary effort native to
his purpose as a writer of colonial origins, to arrive at
the maturity of definitions of self and identity”; “the
meanings and definitions achieved in this phase,” she says,
“are foundational to the total Walcott.”
But Abandoning Dead Metaphors approaches the poems
from a particular angle, as its title (borrowed from “The
Castaway”) suggests. Ismond’s concern is with the evolution
of Walcott’s “pervasive” use of metaphor, which “subserves
the purpose of exploring and defining his native world.” Any
reader of Walcott’s poems must be immediately struck by the
intensity of his metaphoric imagination, in which he is
matched by few living poets anywhere. Recall one of his
lines or one of his phrases, and chances are it has lodged
in the memory because of some vivid, astonishing flash of
metaphor revealing a previously unsuspected resonance in the
everyday world. (I myself think of the opening lines of my
favourite Walcott poem, “The Season of Phantasmal Peace”:
“Then all the nations of birds lifted together / the huge
net of the shadows of this earth”.)
And Walcott himself, by allusion and in direct statement,
has repeatedly insisted on the importance of metaphoric
technique to his role as a poet, particularly in its Adamic
manifestation as the necessity to name things in a fresh,
new world. As he wrote in 1965, in “The Figure of Crusoe”,
“given a virgin world, a paradise, any sound, any act of
naming something … is not really prose, but poetry … but
metaphor.” This act is what he elsewhere calls “poetry’s
surprise, / in a green world, one without metaphors.”
But Ismond’s ultimate argument is that this effort to invent
new names, new terms of reference, a new language, is
Walcott’s response to recognising his “divided self,” his
dual allegiances to the historical experience of the
Caribbean, on one side, and the tradition of European
literature and art on the other. As she defines it,
“Walcott’s anticolonial revolutionary route turns primarily
on a counter-discourse with the … coloniser’s tradition,
against which he pursues an alternative, liberating order of
values and meanings, generated from the different time and
place of his Caribbean, New World ground…. The revolutionary
effort, then, is routed through a metaphorical enterprise.”
Her analysis follows the chronological sequence of the
poems, through which she observes a poetic sensibility
budding, blossoming, ripening. She begins with Walcott’s
first published work, the privately printed 25 Poems
and Epitaph for the Young. Writing twenty years
later, Walcott remembered this time as an apprenticeship in
the workshop of “borrowed metaphors”:
Remember years must pass before he saw an orchestra,In particular, Epitaph for the Young — Walcott’s self-portrait of the artist as a young man — demonstrates his youthful reliance on borrowed models, a borrowed language; Ismond describes this poem in twelve cantos as “a panoply of voices and forms from the masters of the Western literary tradition…. the young Walcott assumes a heritage in that tradition, and aspires to fellowship in and admission to its pieties.” Yet even as he followed the inevitable course of the novice, learning his craft by imitation, he nursed the desire to find the necessary language to sing “the uncouth features” of his “prone island,” as he wrote in one of his earliest poems.
a train, a theatre, the spark-coloured leaves
of autumn whirling from a rail line,
that, as for the seasons,
the works he read described their passage with
processional arrogance; then pardon, life,
if he saw autumn in a rusted leaf.
The sun came through our skins,“Aiming to recover the immanence of the … mythic in the ordinary,” Ismond writes, Walcott “is reaching for an alternative order of values.” She perceives a complex metaphysics of metaphor in the poet’s quest to give new names to his new world, a profound argument with the Western tradition and its modes of thought and comprehension. “Its substantive, countering mission … is the search for an alternative, ‘another light’ of humanist intelligence.”
and we beheld, at last,
the exact sudden definition
of our shadow.
Under our grinding heel
the island burst to a crushed
odour of hogplums, acrid, exuding
a memory stronger than madeleines