Omeros, Derek Walcott and the Contemporary Epic Poem

Clouds unbutton their bodices

and butterflies sail in their yellow odysseys

and shadows everywhere wear the same size.

Omeros (170)

Omeros is a poem 325 pages long, or rather a story told in verse, divided into seven books, each in its turn divided into 64 chapters of three cantos each. It is difficult to summarize its “plot,” or to analyze it chronologically, because structurally it is a mosaic in which the time of the story does not coincide with narrative time. In narrative terms the starting point is actually the end of the story, and the narrator’s associations of thought are traced back—sometimes following the course of his mind, sometimes prompted by his physical presence on the scene of the action—until at the conclusion the whole is enclosed within an almost perfect circle. True, the Greek model is the primary point of reference, but here the point of departure is not Achilles’ anger, nor is the conclusion the funeral of Hector the horse tamer, although there are an Achilles and a Hector in this story, too. There is no single line of development; rather, like Penelope’s woven cloth, there are interwoven threads, complex patterns, all against the background of a collective memory.

One of the few structural constants of the poem is the play of the narration superimposed on historical foundations, which draws the reader into an odyssey through time and space, from the Atlantic to the Mediterranean, from Europe to North America, from the Caribbean to Africa, from the present of a fishing village on the island of St Lucia to the distant past of the Middle Passage, by way of the recent past of the colonies. The figure of the narrator can be seen as the pivot round which the odyssey revolves: it is a figure with two fulcrums, one of which is more intimate than the other, which starts from a personal dimension only to move gradually towards broader horizons, resonating within that most universal of themes, History. The first fulcrum (first also in terms of the way the poem is organized) develops around the story of the narrator’s love affair, and, in the first stages at least, closely follows the progress of Achilles the fisherman’s romances. The second might be defined as the story of the “wandering poet,” a pilgrim who, like a modern Ulysses, has to travel all over the world before his intellectual curiosity is satisfied and his true self discovered: a journey, then, that lasts a lifetime, in search of the very depths of his being, before coming to terms with the enigma of his Creole origins. Thus the hidden nature of the poem is revealed: superimposing the figure of Ulysses on that of the wandering poet, we can read Omeros as the odyssey of one individual and his people, from one capital city to another, from one archipelago to another, from one continent to another, coming back in the end to his native island, with a new, richer awareness that can finally satisfy that profound need to belong which makes the story of one man the epic History of Man. The journey costs effort and time—“Island after island passing. Still we ain’t home” (203)—and it is a melancholy thing to be far from home, despairing of ever finding one’s way in a world where one’s points of reference must be continually retraced—“I thought of Helen / as my island lost in the haze, and I was sure // I’d never see her again” (222). But the pilgrim spirit of the narrator is finally redeemed on the very island where it was born, where it found its formation, its inspiration, love, flight, and—in the island of memory—that inner growth which precedes his return. The St. Lucia from which he is absent is at last recognized as the island of desire: “I saw a sail going out and a sail coming in, // and a breeze so fresh it lifted the lace curtains / . . . like a sail towards Ithaca” (223).

Omeros, the title chosen by Derek Walcott, the...