"Images of Flight. ..": "This time, Shabine, like you really gone!"

When Walcott presented me with his Rodway Prize in 1996, at a ceremony which was one of the high points of my life, he made a speech in which he said that it is difficult to sustain the writing of poetry in the Caribbean. I have not fully understood why he thinks so and have foolishly never remembered to ask him, but through several years of teaching the Wayne Brown Derek Walcott: Selected Poetry to A-Level students in Saint Lucia, I have been brooding on Walcott's relationship with the Caribbean. My brooding came to a head last year when I was reading Patricia Ismond's Abandoning Dead Metaphors. So at this late stage,I feel I have (happily) to pick one more argument with the teacher who did Gerard Manley Hopkins with me for my own A Levels. My students are always on the lookout for articles on Walcott that they can read.

The argument I make here began when I found myself exercising my head on where, geographically, the persona in "The Flock" is situated. Ismond writes that

Walcott, situated in a winter landscape (possibly in the United States) is watching a flock of birds migrating south in search of tropical warmth—a scene which echoes his own yearnings for his "different sky."

(79)

And this troubled me because I have always assumed that the location of the persona was the tropics, where he sits meditating upon his need for a "sense of season" (The Castaway 15), which he sees as more easily available in a temperate climate. The poem seems to me one of several early attempts Walcott makes to convince himself that the tropics really can be a productive place for poetry, when all along his real (although possibly subconscious) conviction is that he will be forced, ultimately, to go through that open door he fears so much in "Cold Spring Harbour," into the "white world of men" (The Gulf 61), which, surely, like the literary world of "Love in the Valley" is also largely the world of white men, cold, scary, and childless "(because you are missing your children)" (The Gulf 61) as that world may be.

There is not much in the language of the poem itself on which either side of this debate can fasten. The sepulchral knight rides "in iron contradiction crouched / against those gusts that urge the mallards south" (The Castaway 15). And of the mallards themselves, he notes that

A season's revolution hones their sense, whose target is our tropic light, while I awoke this sunrise to a violence of images migrating from the mind.

(The Castaway 14)

The target of the mallards in their southern migration is "our tropic light," "our different sky"—I had happily assumed that the our locates the poet/persona within that light, but I take the point that a homesick person in an alien winter landscape could still describe the tropical landscape of home as his own. But the sentence seems to want to place the persona in opposition to the location of the mallards and teal. The picture seems to me more pleasing and more balanced if the ducks migrate south while the images migrating from Walcott's imagination pass them heading north, the crossing of those flocks cementing the connection between the worlds of north and south, a connection that Walcott feels he needs for his poetry. Their yearning for our tropic light then is implicitly balanced by his yearning for their sense of season, their alertness to the passing of time, provided by their temperate climate. But still, the tropics are where the metaphors come, and where the metaphors come from: our light is the tropic one. Most of Walcott's metaphors, his tropes, will be drawn from the tropics as long as he continues to write. His success as a poet comes yes, from his genius with the word, but he never forgets that he was "blest with a virginal, unpainted world / with Adam's task of giving things their names . . ." (Another Life 152). Blessed by birth in the tropics with a...