Still Going On: Temporal Adverbs and the View of the Past in Walcott's Poetry

When he left the beach the sea was still going on.

Omeros (7.LXIV.iii)¹

The last line of Omeros hints at the open-ended eternity of art. At one level, the ending revisits Homer's Odyssey, in which the odyssey is projected beyond the frame of the poem.² At another level, the ending of Omeros launches the poem's afterlife: like the sea, the poem will continue to re-sound. Moreover, the present poem is added to the wave sequence of Walcott's poetic oeuvre; it echoes Walcott's earlier poetry, as it in turn will be echoed in subsequent poems. At yet another level, by ending with a line whose sense resists the formal closure of the poem, Walcott reminds us, through his use of the past continuous tense and the temporal adverb still, that works of art persist in the absence of their authors, and that literature and the literary tradition continue, oblivious to mortal generations.

I want to take the unassuming word still as my point of departure for an exploration of Walcott's subtle use of temporal adverbs in his poetry—an aspect of his language that has not attracted much attention. Although scholars have focused on the importance of time and tense as ideas that have preoccupied Walcott throughout his poetic oeuvre, they have tended to look to metaphor as a vehicle for his complex and idiosyncratic approach to chronology and history.³ However, the full extent to which Walcott's concept of time infuses and informs his use of language can be seen by his pointed use of temporal adverbs. These adverbs establish subtle and unobtrusive relationships between present and past, adding depth of field to the view of the past that is offered in the metaphors.

Walcott has repeatedly stressed that the insistence on linear, historical time serves to perpetuate the colonial condition, by enforcing a temporal sequence in which the so-called new world must necessarily be belated and secondary. This anti-historical conception of time is expounded in the prose essay "The Muse of History," which provides the most insightful commentary on the concepts of history and time that inform Walcott's poetry.⁴ This renunciation of historical time is also figured spatially in Walcott's poetry through the use of culturally neutral, unmarked spaces such as the sea, or the air (specifically light), to level epochs and empires, leading to the image of "landscapes with no tenses" (Tiepolo's Hound, IV.26.ii, p. 161).⁵ Readers of Walcott have become alert to the role of metaphor in his poetry as a trope that orders the relationship between the New World and the Old, holding them both in parallel, in an imaginary space.⁶ John Thieme has written, rather neatly, of Walcott's endeavor, through the depiction of neutral, tenseless spaces, "to assert a parallel spatial collocation rather than a linear temporal debt" (154); whereas Tim Cribb has described the centrality of the sea as both a medium for and a symbol of Walcott's art (poetry and painting):

Walcott is pre-eminently the poet of the sea not only because he is an islander, but also because his art is like the sea. The sea carries things between continents and casts them arbitrarily into new worlds. Its tides wash beaches and make them new as if continually starting again. [. . . ] It is the sea as medium, then, a medium like art in its capacity to transform, that supplies Walcott with an endless metaphor.

(177)⁷

Throughout Omeros Walcott sustains the consubstantiation of sea and poem: the sea is inscribed and envisaged as a text,⁸ and Walcott's art is given substance and reality through its association with sea (the real empire, and the real history).⁹

Looking Past Metaphor

Walcott's engagement with the Greek and Roman past is characterized by ambivalence and equivocalness. One of the reasons why metaphor alone is not adequate to capture the subtlety of this engagement is that it enforces a two-world typology where contending poles are made artificially...