Derek Walcott Quotes

Break a vase, and the love that reassembles the fragments is stronger than that love which took its symmetry for granted when it was whole.

The time will come when, with elation, you will greet yourself arriving at your own door, in your own mirror, and each will smile at the other’s welcome.

I read; I travel; I become

Love After Love The time will come when, with elation you will greet yourself arriving at your own door, in your own mirror and each will smile at the other's welcome, and say, sit here. Eat. You will love again the stranger who was your self. Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart to itself, to the stranger who has loved you all your life, whom you ignored for another, who knows you by heart. Take down the love letters from the bookshelf, the photographs, the desperate notes, peel your own image from the mirror. Sit. Feast on your life.

The future happens. No matter how much we scream.

… the truest writers are those who see language not as a linguistic process but as a living element…

What are men? Children who doubt.

The classics can console. But not enough.

Art is History's nostalgia, it prefers a thatched roof to a concrete factory, and the huge church above a bleached village.

The English language is nobody's special property. It is the property of the imagination: it is the property of the language itself. Derek Walcott

She's a rare vase, out of a cat's reach, on its shelf.

I know when dark-haired evening put on her bright silk at sunset, and, folding the sea sidled under the sheet with her starry laugh, that there'd be no rest, there'd be no forgetting. Is like telling mourners round the graveside about resurrection, they want the dead back.

I loved them as poets love the poetry that kills them, as drowned sailors the sea.

…and either I’m nobody, or I’m a nation.

Love After Love all your life, whom you have ignored for another, who knows you by heart. Take down the love letters from the bookshelf, the photographs, the desperate notes, peel your own image from the mirror. Sit. Feast on your life.

Summer for prose and lemons, for nakedness and languor, for the eternal idleness of the imagined return, for rare flutes and bare feet, and the August bedroom of tangled sheets.

Slowly my body grows a single sound, slowly I become a bell, an oval, disembodied vowel, I grow, an owl, an aureole, white fire poesia "Metamorfosi, I. Luna

I shall unlearn feeling, unlearn my gift. That is greater and harder than what passes there for life.

I too saw the wooden horse blocking the stars.

I'm fond of Derek Walcott too. I could eat his poem "Love After Love." Just peel the words off the page and stuff them in my mouth.

because the fate of poetry is to fall in love with the world, in spite of History.

what I preferred was not statues but the bird in the statue's hair.

Good science and good art are always about a condition of awe . . . I don’t think there is any other function for the poet or the scientist in the human tribe but the astonishment of the soul.

العين النّهمة تفترس المشهد البحري رغبة في إبحارٍ ضئيل

Para atender mejor el oficio del verso/arrodíllate

Today is Thursday, Vallejo is dying, but come, girl, get your raincoat, let's look for life in some cafe behind tear-streaked windows, perhaps the fin de siecle isn't really finished, maybe there's a piano playing it somewhere

To set out for rehearsals in that quivering quarter-hour is to engage conclusions, not beginnings, for one walks past the guilded hallucinations of poverty with a corrupt resignation touched by details, as if the destitute, in their orange-tinted back yards, under their dusty trees, or climbing into their favelas, were all natural scene designers and poverty were not a condition but an art. Deprivation is made lyrical, and twilight, with the patience of alchemy, almost transmutes despair into virtue. In the tropics nothing is lovelier than the allotments of the poor, no theater is as vivid, voluble, and cheap.

I read, I travel, I become

But drunkenly, or secretly, we swore, Disciples of that astigmatic saint, That we would never leave the island Until we had put down, in paint, in words, As palmists learn the network of a hand, All of its sunken, leaf-choked ravines, Every neglected, self-pitying inlet Muttering in brackish dialect, the ropes of mangroves From which old soldier crabs slipped Surrendering to slush, Each ochre track seeking some hilltop and Losing itself in an unfinished phrase, Under sand shipyards where the burnt-out palms Inverted the design of unrigged schooners, Entering forests, boiling with life, Goyave, corrosol, bois-canot, sapotille. Days! The sun drumming, drumming, Past the defeated pennons of the palms, Roads limp from sunstroke, Past green flutes of the grass The ocean cannonading, come! Wonder that opened like the fan Of the dividing fronds On some noon-struck sahara, Where my heart from its rib cage yelped like a pup After clouds of sanderlings rustily wheeling The world on its ancient, Invisible axis, The breakers slow-dolphining over more breakers, To swivel our easels down, as firm As conquerors who had discovered home.

There is the buried language and there is the individual vocabulary, and the process of poetry is one of excavation and of self-discovery. Tonally the individual voice is a dialect; it shapes its own accent, its own vocabulary and melody in defiance of an imperial concept of language, the language of Ozymandias, libraries and dictionaries, law courts and critics, and churches, universities, political dogma, the diction of institutions. Poetry is an island that breaks away from the main.

The fist clenched round my heart loosens a little, and I gasp brightness; but it tightens again. When have I ever not loved the pain of love? But this has moved past love to mania. This has the strong clench of the madman, this is gripping the ledge of unreason, before plunging howling into the abyss. Hold hard then, heart. This way at least you live.

Who with the Devil tries to play fair, weaves the net of his own despair. Oh, smile; what’s a house between drunkards?

For there is a time in the tide of the heart, when Arrived at its anchor of suffering, a grave Or a bed, despairing in action, we ask O God, where is our home?

The future happens, no matter how much we scream.

[On Love After Love by Derek Walcott] I read this poem often, once a month at least. In the madness and mayhem of modern life, where every man seems committed to an endless search for the approval and esteem of his fellows and peers, no matter what the cost, this poem reminds me of a basic truth: that we are, as we are, "enough". Most of us are motivated deep down by a sense of insufficiency, a need to be better stronger, faster; to work harder; to be more committed, more kind, more self-sufficient, more successful. But this short poem by Derek Walcott is like a declaration of unconditional love. It's like the embrace of an old friend. He brings us to an awareness of the present moment, calm and peaceful, and to a feeling of gratitude for everything we have. I have read it to my dearest friends after dinner once, and to my family at Christmas, and they started crying, which always, unfailingly, makes me cry.

Caribbean culture is not evolving but already shaped. Its proportions are not to be measured by the traveller or the exile, but by its own citizenry and architecture. To be told you are not yet a city or a culture requires this response. I am not your city or your culture.

I do not live in you, I bear my house inside me, everywhere until your winters grow more kind by the dancing firelight of mind where knobs of brass do not exist whose doors dissolve in tenderness House that lets in, at last, those fears that are its guests, to sit on chairs feasts on their human faces, and takes pity simply by the hand shows her her room, and feels the hum of wood and brick becoming home.

Die koloniale Theatertradition fungierte ja nicht nur als Feindbild, sie konnte andererseits auch eine Reihe von Einflüssen und Vorbildern anbieten. So war etwa die Wiederbelebung der irischen folk tradition in der Zeit der Jahrhundertwende, die sich um Autoren wie W.B.Yeats, J.M.Synge und dem Abbey Theatre vollzog, besonders in den 1950er Jahren für Künstler in der Dritten Welt, die ihrerseits im Prozess der Selbstdefinition begriffen waren, eine wichtige Quelle der Inspiration. Sowohl Wole Soyinka als auch Derek Walcott geben an, sie hätten starke Einflüsse von dieser Bewegung erhalten, speziell in der Frühphase ihrer Arbeit.

Who is the man who can speak to the strong? Where is the fool who can talk to the wise? Men who are dead now have learnt this long, Bitter is wisdom that fails when it tries.

You want to hear my history? Ask the sea.

I should like to keep these simple joys inviolate, not because they are innocent, but because they are true

You will love again the stranger who was your self. Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart to itself, to the stranger who has loved you all your life, whom you ignored for another, who knows you by heart.

As human beings we’ve certainly suffered the loss of awe, the loss of sacredness, and the loss of the fact that we’re not here— we’re not put on earth— to shape it anyway we want... You want something to happen with poetry, but it doesn’t make anything happen. So then somebody says, “What’s the use of poetry?” Then you say, “Well, what’s the use of a cloud? What’s the use of a river? What’s the use of a tree?” They don’t make anything happen.

Let them run ahead. Then I’ll have good reason for shooting them down. Sharpeville? Attempting to escape. Attempting to escape from the prison of their lives. That’s the most dangerous crime. It brings about revolution. So, off we go, lads!

A Far Cry From Africa A wind is ruffling the tawny pelt Of Africa. Kikuyu, quick as flies, Batten upon the bloodstreams of the veldt. Corpses are scattered through a paradise. Only the worm, colonel of carrion, cries: “Waste no compassion on these separate dead!” Statistics justify and scholars seize The salients of colonial policy. What is that to the white child hacked in bed? To savages, expendable as Jews? Threshed out by beaters, the long rushes break In a white dust of ibises whose cries Have wheeled since civilization’s dawn From the parched river or beast-teeming plain. The violence of beast on beast is read As natural law, but upright man Seeks his divinity by inflicting pain. Delirious as these worried beasts, his wars Dance to the tightened carcass of a drum, While he calls courage still that native dread Of the white peace contracted by the dead. Again brutish necessity wipes its hands Upon the napkin of a dirty cause, again A waste of our compassion, as with Spain, The gorilla wrestles with the superman. I who am poisoned with the blood of both, Where shall I turn, divided to the vein? I who have cursed The drunken officer of British rule, how choose Between this Africa and the English tongue I love? Betray them both, or give back what they give? How can I face such slaughter and be cool? How can I turn from Africa and live?

Why couldn't they love the place, same way, together, the way he always loved her, even with his sore? Love Helen like a wife in good and bad weather, in sickness and in health, its beauty in being poor? The way the leaves loved her, not like a pink leaflet printed with slogans of black people fighting war?

These are the days when, however simple the future, we do not go towards it but leave part of life in a lobby whose elevators divide and enclose us, brightening digits that show exactly where we are headed, while a young Polish woman is emptying an ashtray, and we are drawn to a window whose strings, if we pull them, widen an emptiness.

Where are your monuments, your battles, martyrs? Where is your tribal memory? Sirs, in that gray vault. The sea. The sea has locked them up. The sea is History. First, there was the heaving oil, heavy as chaos; then, likea light at the end of a tunnel, the lantern of a caravel, and that was Genesis. Then there were the packed cries, the shit, the moaning: Exodus. Bone soldered by coral to bone, mosaics mantled by the benediction of the shark's shadow, that was the Ark of the Covenant. Then came from the plucked wires of sunlight on the sea floor the plangent harp of the Babylonian bondage, as the white cowries clustered like manacles on the drowned women, and those were the ivory bracelets of the Song of Solomon, but the ocean kept turning blank pages looking for History. Then came the men with eyes heavy as anchors who sank without tombs, brigands who barbecued cattle, leaving their charred ribs like palm leaves on the shore, then the foaming, rabid maw of the tidal wave swallowing Port Royal, and that was Jonah, but where is your Renaissance? Sir, it is locked in them sea sands out there past the reef's moiling shelf, where the men-o'-war floated down; strop on these goggles, I'll guide you there myself. It's all subtle and submarine, through colonnades of coral, past the gothic windows of sea fans to where the crusty grouper, onyx-eyed, blinks, weighted by its jewels, like a bald queen; and these groined caves with barnacles pitted like stone are our cathedrals, and the furnace before the hurricanes: Gomorrah. Bones ground by windmills into marl and cornmeal, and that was Lamentations - that was just Lamentations, it was not History; then came, like scum on the river's drying lip, the brown reeds of villages mantling and congealing into towns, and at evening, the midges' choirs, and above them, the spires lancing the side of God as His son set, and that was the New Testament. Then came the white sisters clapping to the waves' progress, and that was Emancipation - jubilation, O jubilation - vanishing swiftly as the sea's lace dries in the sun, but that was not History, that was only faith, and then each rock broke into its own nation; then came the synod of flies, then came the secretarial heron, then came the bullfrog bellowing for a vote, fireflies with bright ideas and bats like jetting ambassadors and the mantis, like khaki police, and the furred caterpillars of judges examining each case closely, and then in the dark ears of ferns and in the salt chuckle of rocks with their sea pools, there was the sound like a rumour without any echo of History, really beginning.

In the Village III Who has removed the typewriter from my desk, so that I am a musician without his piano with emptiness ahead as clear and grotesque as another spring? My veins bud, and I am so full of poems, a wastebasket of black wire. The notes outside are visible; sparrows will line antennae like staves, the way springs were, but the roofs are cold and the great grey river where a liner glides, huge as a winter hill, moves imperceptibly like the accumulating years. I have no reason to forgive her for what I brought on myself. I am past hating, past the longing for Italy where blowing snow absolves and whitens a kneeling mountain range outside Milan. Through glass, I am waiting for the sound of a bird to unhinge the beginning of spring, but my hands, my work, feel strange without the rusty music of my machine. No words for the Arctic liner moving down the Hudson, for the mange of old snow moulting from the roofs. No poems. No birds.

Bleecker Street, Summer" Summer for prose and lemons, for nakedness and languor, for the eternal idleness of the imagined return, for rare flutes and bare feet, and the August bedroom of tangled sheets and the Sunday salt, ah violin! When I press summer dusks together, it is a month of street accordions and sprinklers laying the dust, small shadows running from me. It is music opening and closing, Italia mia, on Bleecker, ciao, Antonio, and the water-cries of children tearing the rose-coloured sky in streams of paper; it is dusk in the nostrils and the smell of water down littered streets that lead you to no water, and gathering islands and lemons in the mind. There is the Hudson, like the sea aflame. I would undress you in the summer heat, and laugh and dry your damp flesh if you came.

Your wanderer is a phantom from the boy's shore. Mark you, he does not go; he sends his narrator; he plays tricks with time because there are two journeys in every odyssey, one on worried water, the other crouched and motionless, without noise. For both, the 'I' is a mast; a desk is a raft for one, foaming with paper, and dipping the beak of a pen in its foam, while an actual craft carries the other to cities where people speak a different language, or look at him differently, while the sun rises from the other direction with its unsettling shadows, but the right journey is motionless; as the sea moves round an island that appears to be moving, Jove moves round the heart with encircling salt, and the slowly travelling hand knows it returns to the port from which it must start. Therefore, this is what this island has meant to you, why my bust spoke, why the sea-swift was sent to you: to circle yourself and your island with this art.

...and either I’m nobody, or I’m a nation

The time will come when, with elation you will greet yourself arriving at your own door, in your own mirror and each will smile at the other's welcome, and say, sit here. Eat. You will love again the stranger who was your self. Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart to itself, to the stranger who has loved you all your life, whom you ignored for another, who knows you by heart. Take down the love letters from the bookshelf, the photographs, the desperate notes, peel your own image from the mirror. Sit. Feast on your life.

Derek Walcott, the Nobel laureate poet, wrote in his famous epic work Omeros of his fisherman-hero Achilles walking finally and wearily up the shingled slope of an Atlantic beach. He has turned his back on the sea at last, but he knows that even without his seeing it, it is behind him all the while and simply, ponderously, magnificently, ominously, continuing to be the sea. The Ocean is, quite simply, “still going on.

Sit. Feast on your life.” —Derek Walcott

Derek Walcott wrote in his 1992 Nobel Lecture about the enthusiasm of the tourist: What is hidden cannot be loved. The traveller cannot love, since love is stasis and travel is motion. If he returns to what he loved in a landscape and stays there, he is no longer a traveller but in stasis and concentration, the lover of that particular part of earth, a native. So many people say they ‘love the Caribbean’, meaning that someday they plan to return for a visit but could never live there, the usual benign insult of the traveller, the tourist. These travellers, at their kindest, were devoted to the same patronage, the islands passing in profile, their vegetal luxury, their backwardness and poverty . . . What is the earthly paradise for our visitors? Two weeks without rain and a mahogany tan, and, at sunset, local troubadours in straw hats and floral shirts beating ‘Yellow Bird’ and ‘Banana Boat Song’ to death. There is a territory wider than this – wider than the limits made by the map of an island – which is the illimitable sea and what it remembers. All of the Antilles, every island, is an effort of memory; every mind, every racial biography culminating in amnesia and fog. Pieces of sunlight through the fog and sudden rainbows, arcs-en-ciel.24

The time will come when, with elation you will greet yourself arriving at your own door, in your own mirror and each will smile at the other’s welcome, and say, sit here. Eat. You will love again the stranger who was your self. Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart to itself, to the stranger who has loved you all your life, whom you ignored for another, who knows you by heart. Take down the love letters from the bookshelf, the photographs, the desperate notes, peel your own image from the mirror. Sit. Feast on your life. - “Love After Love” by Derek Walcott

You will love again the stranger who was your self … Sit. Feast on your life. Derek Walcott, Love After Love

Love After Love The time will come when, with elation you will greet yourself arriving at your own door, in your own mirror and each will smile at the other's welcome, and say, sit here. Eat. You will love again the stranger who was your self. Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart to itself, to the stranger who has loved you all your life, whom you ignored for another, who knows you by heart. Take down the love letters from the bookshelf, the photographs, the desperate notes, peel your own image from the mirror. Sit. Feast on your life.

The day, with all its pain ahead, is yours. The ceaseless creasing of the morning sea, the fluttering gamboge cedar leaves allegro, the rods of the yawning branches trolling the breeze, the rusted meadows, the wind-whitened grass, the coos of the stone-colored ground doves on the road, the echo of benediction on a house – its rooms of pain, its verandah of remorse when joy lanced through its open-hearted doors like a hummingbird out to the garden and the pool in which the sky has fallen. These are all yours, and pain has made them brighter as absence does after a death, as the light heals the grass.

I am the man my father loved and was.

The second Adam since the fall His germinal Corruption held the seed Of that congenital heresy that men fail According to their creed. Craftsman and castaway All heaven in his head, He watched his shadow pray Not for God’s love but human love instead.

Sea Grapes" That sail which leans on light, tired of islands, a schooner beating up the Caribbean for home, could be Odysseus, home-bound on the Aegean; that father and husband's longing, under gnarled sour grapes, is like the adulterer hearing Nausicaa's name in every gull's outcry. This brings nobody peace. The ancient war between obsession and responsibility will never finish and has been the same for the sea-wanderer or the one on shore now wriggling on his sandals to walk home, since Troy sighed its last flame, and the blind giant's boulder heaved the trough from whose groundswell the great hexameters come to the conclusions of exhausted surf. The classics can console. But not enough.

সাগরই হচ্ছে সেই মহাকাব্য, যার সংস্পর্শে এলে আগের লেখা কবিতার প্রতিটি পংক্তি মুছে যায়, আবার নতুন করে সাগরের ফেনায় ফেনায় পংক্তিগুলো রচনা করার ইচ্ছা জাগে

and the frayed earth, crisscrossed like old bagasse, spring to a cushiony quilt of emerald grass, and who does sew and sow and patch the land?

is the same voices that, in the slave ship, smile at their brothers, “Boy, is just the whip,

Every word I have written took the wrong approach. I

It is not that History is obliterated by this sunrise. It is there in Antillean geography, in the vegetation itself. The sea sighs with the drowned from the Middle Passage, the butchery of its aborigines, Carib and Aruac and Taino, bleeds in the scarlet of the immortelle, and even the actions of surf on sand cannot erase the African memory, or the lances of cane as a green prison where indentured Asians, the ancestors of Felicity, are still serving time.

That is the effort, the labour of the Antillean imagination, rebuilding its gods from bamboo frames, phrase by phrase.

Here is where a real fresco should be painted, one without importance, but one with real faith, mapless, Historyless.

History was fact, History was a cannon, not a lizard; De Grasse leaving Martinique, and Rodney crouching to act in the right wind. Iounalo, my royal arse! Hewanorra, my hole! Was the greatest battle in naval history, which put the French to rout, fought for a creature with a disposable tail and elbows like a goalie?

You will love again the stranger who was your self. Give wine. Give bread, Give back your heart to itself, to the stranger who has loved you all your life, whom you ignored for another, who knows you by heart. Take down the love letters from the bookshelf the photographs, the desperate notes, peel your own image from the mirror. Sit. Feast on your life.