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The Fortunate Traveller
Derek Walcott has for some time been recognized as one of the most accomplished and resourceful poets writing in English. This volume of his work, which contains such poems as "Olde New England" and "Piano Practice" cements this reputation.
- GenresPoetryPost Colonial
112 pages, Hardcover
First published December 31, 1981
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About the author
Derek Walcott
181 books502 followersDerek Walcott was a Caribbean poet, playwright, writer and visual artist. Born in Castries, St. Lucia, he won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1992 "for a poetic oeuvre of great luminosity, sustained by a historical vision, the outcome of a multicultural commitment."
His work, which developed independently of the schools of magic realism emerging in both South America and Europe at around the time of his birth, is intensely related to the symbolism of myth and its relationship to culture. He was best known for his epic poem Omeros, a reworking of Homeric story and tradition into a journey around the Caribbean and beyond to the American West and London.
Walcott founded the Trinidad Theatre Workshop in 1959, which has produced his plays (and others) since that time, and remained active with its Board of Directors until his death. He also founded Boston Playwrights' Theatre at Boston University in 1981. In 2004, Walcott was awarded the Anisfield-Wolf Lifetime Achievement Award, and had retired from teaching poetry and drama in the Creative Writing Department at Boston University by 2007. He continued to give readings and lectures throughout the world after retiring. He divided his time between his home in the Caribbean and New York City.
His work, which developed independently of the schools of magic realism emerging in both South America and Europe at around the time of his birth, is intensely related to the symbolism of myth and its relationship to culture. He was best known for his epic poem Omeros, a reworking of Homeric story and tradition into a journey around the Caribbean and beyond to the American West and London.
Walcott founded the Trinidad Theatre Workshop in 1959, which has produced his plays (and others) since that time, and remained active with its Board of Directors until his death. He also founded Boston Playwrights' Theatre at Boston University in 1981. In 2004, Walcott was awarded the Anisfield-Wolf Lifetime Achievement Award, and had retired from teaching poetry and drama in the Creative Writing Department at Boston University by 2007. He continued to give readings and lectures throughout the world after retiring. He divided his time between his home in the Caribbean and New York City.
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
August 16, 2021
“Then all the nations of birds lifted together
the huge net of the shadows of this earth
in multitudinous dialects, twittering tongues,
stitching and crossing it. They lifted up
the shadows of long pines down trackless slopes,
the shadows of glass-faced towers down evening streets,
the shadow of a frail plant on a city sill—
the net rising soundless as night, the birds' cries soundless, until
there was no longer dusk, or season, decline, or weather,
only this passage of phantasmal light
that not the narrowest shadow dared to sever.
And men could not see, looking up, what the wild geese drew,
what the ospreys trailed behind them in silvery ropes
that flashed in the icy sunlight; they could not hear
battalions of starlings waging peaceful cries,
bearing the net higher, covering this world
like the vines of an orchard, or a mother drawing
the trembling gauze over the trembling eyes
of a child fluttering to sleep;
it was the light
that you will see at evening on the side of a hill
in yellow October, and no one hearing knew
what change had brought into the raven's cawing,
the killdeer's screech, the ember-circling chough
such an immense, soundless, and high concern
for the fields and cities where the birds belong,
except it was their seasonal passing, Love,
made seasonless, or, from the high privilege of their birth,
something brighter than pity for the wingless ones
below them who shared dark holes in windows and in houses,
and higher they lifted the net with soundless voices
above all change, betrayals of falling suns,
and this season lasted one moment, like the pause
between dusk and darkness, between fury and peace,
but, for such as our earth is now, it lasted long.”
the huge net of the shadows of this earth
in multitudinous dialects, twittering tongues,
stitching and crossing it. They lifted up
the shadows of long pines down trackless slopes,
the shadows of glass-faced towers down evening streets,
the shadow of a frail plant on a city sill—
the net rising soundless as night, the birds' cries soundless, until
there was no longer dusk, or season, decline, or weather,
only this passage of phantasmal light
that not the narrowest shadow dared to sever.
And men could not see, looking up, what the wild geese drew,
what the ospreys trailed behind them in silvery ropes
that flashed in the icy sunlight; they could not hear
battalions of starlings waging peaceful cries,
bearing the net higher, covering this world
like the vines of an orchard, or a mother drawing
the trembling gauze over the trembling eyes
of a child fluttering to sleep;
it was the light
that you will see at evening on the side of a hill
in yellow October, and no one hearing knew
what change had brought into the raven's cawing,
the killdeer's screech, the ember-circling chough
such an immense, soundless, and high concern
for the fields and cities where the birds belong,
except it was their seasonal passing, Love,
made seasonless, or, from the high privilege of their birth,
something brighter than pity for the wingless ones
below them who shared dark holes in windows and in houses,
and higher they lifted the net with soundless voices
above all change, betrayals of falling suns,
and this season lasted one moment, like the pause
between dusk and darkness, between fury and peace,
but, for such as our earth is now, it lasted long.”
January 27, 2022
No billboard model
but a woman, gaunt,
in a freckled print,
some bony aunt
whose man broke down at the steel mill,
whose daughter chews wild grain in some commune in Arizona,
whose son is a wreath of dried corn
nailed to the door;
Muse of the emigrants,
Walker Evans's Muse,
hugging her ribs,
she wouldn't let you in,
she'd soon be phoning
the State Police;
but she has grown so thin,
so care-concerned,
that wind-burned
hollow face,
the way her mouth winces,
thin as a stick fence,
quiet as cancer.
I pity her. I guess
I would like her well.
Dreamer down afternoon highways -
Trailways fantasist -
through whose transparent profile
the meadows and towns revolve,
who still believes in
the apparition of wingless angels,
like that one who stands on the verge
of the hurting turnpike
thumbing a ride from the surge
of ignorance traffic.
* * *
In their faint photographs
Mottled with chemicals,
Like the left hand of some spinster aunt,
They have drifted to the edge
Of verandahs in Whistlerian
White, their jungle turned tea-brown—
Even its spiked palms—
Their features pale,
To be penciled in:
Bone-collared gentlemen
With spiked moustaches
And their wives embayed in the wickerwork
Armchairs, all looking coloured
From the distance of a century
Beginning to groan sideways from the axe stroke!
Their bay horses blacken
Like spaniels, the front lawn a beige
Carpet, brown moonlight and a moon
So sallow, so pharmaceutical
That her face is a feverish child’s,
Some malarial angel
Whose grave still cowers
Under a fury of bush,
a mania of wild yams
wrangling to hide her from ancestral churchyards.
And the sigh of that child
Is white as an orchid
On a crusted log
In the bush of Dominica,
A V of Chinese white
Meant for the beat of a seagull
Over a sepia souvenir of Cornwall,
As the white
hush between two sentences.
Sundays! Their furnace
Of boredom after church.
A maiden aunt canoes through lilies of clouds
In a Carib hammock, to a hymn’s metronome,
And the child on the vanished lion-footed couch
Sees the hills dip and straighten with each lurch.
The green-leaved uproar of the century
Turns dim as the Atlantic, a rumourous haze
Behind the lime trees, breakers
Advancing in decorous, pleated lace,
The cement grindstone of the afternoon
Turns slowly, sharpening her senses,
The bay below is green as calalu, stewing Sargasso.
In that fierce hush
Between Dominican mountains
The child expects a sound
From a butterfly clipping itself to a bush
Like a gold earring to a black maid’s ear—
One who goes down to the village, visiting,
Whose pink dress wilts like a flower between the limes.
There are logs
Wrinkled like the hand of an old woman
Who wrote with a fine courtesy to that world
When grace was common as malaria,
When the as lanterns’ hiss on the verandah
Drew the aunts out like moths
Doomed to be pressed in a book, to fall
Into the brown oblivion of an album,
Embroiderers of silence
For whom the arches of the Thames,
Parliament’s needles,
And the petit-point reflections of London Bridge
Fade like the hammock cushions from the sun,
Where one night
A child stares at the windless candle flame
From the corner of a lion-footed couch
At the erect white light,
Her right hand married to Jane Eyre
Foreseeing that her own white wedding dress
Will be white paper.
* * *
but a woman, gaunt,
in a freckled print,
some bony aunt
whose man broke down at the steel mill,
whose daughter chews wild grain in some commune in Arizona,
whose son is a wreath of dried corn
nailed to the door;
Muse of the emigrants,
Walker Evans's Muse,
hugging her ribs,
she wouldn't let you in,
she'd soon be phoning
the State Police;
but she has grown so thin,
so care-concerned,
that wind-burned
hollow face,
the way her mouth winces,
thin as a stick fence,
quiet as cancer.
I pity her. I guess
I would like her well.
Dreamer down afternoon highways -
Trailways fantasist -
through whose transparent profile
the meadows and towns revolve,
who still believes in
the apparition of wingless angels,
like that one who stands on the verge
of the hurting turnpike
thumbing a ride from the surge
of ignorance traffic.
- American Muse, pg. 7-8
* * *
In their faint photographs
Mottled with chemicals,
Like the left hand of some spinster aunt,
They have drifted to the edge
Of verandahs in Whistlerian
White, their jungle turned tea-brown—
Even its spiked palms—
Their features pale,
To be penciled in:
Bone-collared gentlemen
With spiked moustaches
And their wives embayed in the wickerwork
Armchairs, all looking coloured
From the distance of a century
Beginning to groan sideways from the axe stroke!
Their bay horses blacken
Like spaniels, the front lawn a beige
Carpet, brown moonlight and a moon
So sallow, so pharmaceutical
That her face is a feverish child’s,
Some malarial angel
Whose grave still cowers
Under a fury of bush,
a mania of wild yams
wrangling to hide her from ancestral churchyards.
And the sigh of that child
Is white as an orchid
On a crusted log
In the bush of Dominica,
A V of Chinese white
Meant for the beat of a seagull
Over a sepia souvenir of Cornwall,
As the white
hush between two sentences.
Sundays! Their furnace
Of boredom after church.
A maiden aunt canoes through lilies of clouds
In a Carib hammock, to a hymn’s metronome,
And the child on the vanished lion-footed couch
Sees the hills dip and straighten with each lurch.
The green-leaved uproar of the century
Turns dim as the Atlantic, a rumourous haze
Behind the lime trees, breakers
Advancing in decorous, pleated lace,
The cement grindstone of the afternoon
Turns slowly, sharpening her senses,
The bay below is green as calalu, stewing Sargasso.
In that fierce hush
Between Dominican mountains
The child expects a sound
From a butterfly clipping itself to a bush
Like a gold earring to a black maid’s ear—
One who goes down to the village, visiting,
Whose pink dress wilts like a flower between the limes.
There are logs
Wrinkled like the hand of an old woman
Who wrote with a fine courtesy to that world
When grace was common as malaria,
When the as lanterns’ hiss on the verandah
Drew the aunts out like moths
Doomed to be pressed in a book, to fall
Into the brown oblivion of an album,
Embroiderers of silence
For whom the arches of the Thames,
Parliament’s needles,
And the petit-point reflections of London Bridge
Fade like the hammock cushions from the sun,
Where one night
A child stares at the windless candle flame
From the corner of a lion-footed couch
At the erect white light,
Her right hand married to Jane Eyre
Foreseeing that her own white wedding dress
Will be white paper.
- Jean Rhys, pg. 45-47
* * *
Then all the nations of birds lifted together
the huge net of the shadows of this earth
in multitudinous dialects, twittering tongues,
stitching and crossing it. They lifted up
the shadows of long pines down trackless slopes,
the shadows of glass-faced towers down evening streets,
the shadow of a frail plant on a city sill—
the net rising soundless as night, the birds' cries soundless, until
there was no longer dusk, or season, decline, or weather,
only this passage of phantasmal light
that not the narrowest shadow dared to sever.
And men could not see, looking up, what the wild geese drew,
what the ospreys trailed behind them in silvery ropes
that flashed in the icy sunlight; they could not hear
battalions of starlings waging peaceful cries,
bearing the net higher, covering this world
like the vines of an orchard, or a mother drawing
the trembling gauze over the trembling eyes
of a child fluttering to sleep;
it was the light
that you will see at evening on the side of a hill
in yellow October, and no one hearing knew
what change had brought into the raven's cawing,
the killdeer's screech, the ember-circling chough
such an immense, soundless, and high concern
for the fields and cities where the birds belong,
except it was their seasonal passing, Love,
made seasonless, or, from the high privilege of their birth,
something brighter than pity for the wingless ones
below them who shared dark holes in windows and in houses,
and higher they lifted the net with soundless voices
above all change, betrayals of falling suns,
and this season lasted one moment, like the pause
between dusk and darkness, between fury and peace,
but, for such as our earth is now, it lasted long.- The Season of Phantasmal Peace, pg. 152-153
May 24, 2022
this really isn't my favourite style of poetry. it sort of weaves on and on like a song that goes on and on and on without much by way of the experimental, and it's loaded with a bunch of stuffy classical references that takes away from the immediacy of poetry- BUT by the end of this collection (it took me a year to read) i noticed the powerful themes, the beauty of the imagery, and i was able to overlook the displeasing form and was kind of lulled into the dizzying allusive lyricism and yeah, wow.
May 30, 2014
Walcott reinvents the Odyssey by breathing Caribbean language into Homer's epic, all the while remaining true to the story itself (at least the high points, as the stage version is dramatically shorter). I love the double meaning implied in lines such as that of Captain Mentes when he says of Odysseus's tricks: "I too saw the wooden horse blocking the stars." There a great declamations like that of Menelaus ("What are men? Children who doubt.") and the Philosopher ("The future happens. No matter how much we scream."). Finally, there are Walcott's distilled metaphors, such as "She's a rare vase, out of a cat's reach, on its shelf."
Walcott has an extraordinary talent to distill and sublimate language while elevating the language of his country. This work is an excellent example.
Walcott has an extraordinary talent to distill and sublimate language while elevating the language of his country. This work is an excellent example.
May 10, 2016
Poetry collection from a nobel prize winner. A lot of it reads more as poetic prose. But all of it is good stuff. Would recommend.
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews