Smile was netted in wrinkles, but I felt the feverīriefly returning as we sat there, crippled, hating She was treble-chinned, old, her devastating To be golden and beautiful and young foreverĮven as I aged. Hunched like a crumpled flower, the one whom I thoughtĪs the fire of my young life would do her duty I saw, sitting in her own wheelchair, her beauty In my wheelchair in the Virgin lounge at Vieuxfort, But what does love do to time? What does time do to love? “Sixty Years After” is a poem about an encounter with a truly old flame: Perhaps unconsummated love yields sweeter poetry, with the sense of lost opportunity. The middle-aged poet of “Light of the World” wrote with a tinge of regret about the beauty humming along as Marley rocked from the transport radio, his artist eye tracing the spread of light on her black skin-“O Beauty, you are the light of the world!”-he thought, concealing a tear as he departed from the transport. There is of course also love, requited and unrequited. There are several poems about place-“Barcelona,” “A London Afternoon,” “In Amsterdam,” and “In Italy,” first encountered in The New Yorker: “I have come this late/To Italy, but better now, perhaps, than in youth/That is never satisfied, whose joys are treacherous.” Walcott was conscious of being a traveller-a fortunate one, in spite of identity crises-through time and space. There are stock Walcott themes like empire, in poems like “The Lost Empire” and “The Spectre of Empire.” There are elegies for friends like Aime Cesaire. This collection, published in the year the poet turned 80, gives a sense of recapitulation. There is only a poet who has dwelt so intimately with this entity that is his Style, his Voice, that he and the Voice are one and the same, like an old griot and his rocking cane chair are one. In White Egrets there is no straining for meaning, no anxiety of influence. Triumphant, because in a career spanning close to seven decades he had created a corpus surely as majestic and timeless as the Arch de Triomphe, and his final collection put a stamp on that. He did survive 2009, lived eight more years after that, though in poor health. To paint and write well in what could be my last year. I want the year 2009 to be as angled with lightĪs a Dutch interior or an alley by Vermeer, “In Amsterdam,” a poem I earlier had the pleasure of listening to Walcott read on YouTube, heightened by images of the city, now assumed new meaning – Reading White Egrets posthumously these last couple of months, one is struck by the foreboding in some of the poems, a clear sense that the author was coming to terms with imminent mortality. Only in the last year have I allowed myself to touch the ones that came after- Tiepolo’s Hound, the Prodigal, and now, finally, White Egrets. Studying him chronologically has been a labour of love, from the collections he published in his thirties ( In a Green Night, The Castaway, The Gulf) and forties ( Another Life, Sea Grapes, The Star Apple Kingdom) to his fifties ( The Fortunate Traveller, Midsummer, The Arkansas testament), culminating in Omeros, the “epic of the dispossessed,” easily one of the top ten volumes of poetry existing in human civilization. Kole Omotoso has argued, quite persuasively in a posthumous tribute, that Walcott was an even greater playwright than poet, but Walcott for me, as for many, was the Poet. Thereafter came the drama ( Dream on Monkey Mountain, staged one of those undergraduate nights at the University of Ibadan Arts Theatre) and the essays. There was a poem titled “Miramar,” which was different from anything I had read up until that time. There was a reference to his majestic verse and devilish ways: “I’m beginning to feel like the beast of Boston,” he was quoted as saying. I first read about Walcott in 1992, on the pages of Weekend Concord, in an article probably written by Mike Awoyinfa, shortly after Walcott won the Nobel. The first instinct, after the shock of Akin Adesokan’s retweet of Jeanne-Marie Jackson’s tweet, was to find the YouTube video of the Walcott interview with Christian Campbell, in which he read “The Light of the World,” starting with the epigraph from Bob Marley-“Kaya now, got to have kaya now, /got to have kaya now, / for the rain is falling.” His voice had that unmistakable lilt he owned Marley, owned the lyric and the song, owned every stretch of the Caribbean. A few deaths have rocked my world lately – notably Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Umberto Eco – but none felt so personal as Walcott’s.
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