BOOKS
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ruption of language... ; a paper currency is employed when there is
no bullion in the vaults." Within this debased economy, Ashbery as
poetlguerilla engages in oblique tactics to dislodge a nontranscen–
dent salvation which can be shared: language redeemed, finally, as
both vision and communal bond. "You have returned not to the su–
pernatural glow of heaven but to the ordinary daylight .... The per–
son sitting opposite you who asked you a question is still waiting for
an answer; he had not yet found your hesitation unusual, but it is up
to you to grasp it with both hands, wrenching it from the web of con–
nectives to rub off the grime that has obscured its brilliance so as to
restore it to him ..."
(Three Poems).
Spender and Ashbery, in their different ways, are lyric and
elegiac poets; Walcott reaches into the tragic.
It
is not simply that
dramatic force leaks from his verse plays into the poems. Born in St.
Lucia, Walcott received division as his colonial inheritance, with
one black and one white grandfather, two languages, two imag–
inative worlds struggling for expression within him. His poems do
not discuss or recount history; history throbs physically and fatally
through them, the name of the English grandfather, who burned to
death, searing the poet's skin like a hair shirt, the colonial schoolboy
pinning a Flanders poppy to his blazer:
"It
bled like a vowel."
(Mid–
summer
LII).
Politics and language are welded together. For Walcott,
who "had entered the house of literature as a houseboy," writing in
English is a wresting of power and selfhood from the hands of en–
slavers. "I have Dutch, nigger, and English in
mel
and either "I'm
nobody, or I'm a nation," proclaims Shabine, the sailor! poet of "The
Schooner Flight," the same who remarks, "A spit like that worth any
number of words.lBut that's all them bastards have left us: words ."
In the early work Walcott announces his scheme of reposses–
sion: "Between the Greek and African pantheon,lLost animist, I
rechristened trees." Already these poems shudder with the force of
metaphor, liberating metamorphoses of the given world: "The flower–
ing breaker detonates its surf.lWhite bees hiss in the coral skull."
("Origins"). But this poem slips the banished dialect in only surrep–
titiously amidst its gorgeous decorum: "Pommes de Cythere, bitter
Cytherean apple." In general, the early work enacts possession by
flaunting mastery of paternal voices - Dylan Thomas, Eliot, Yeats,
Marvell- and oscillates somewhat uneasily between such demon–
strations and dialect poems. But in "Tales of the Islands," a pro–
totype of the autobiographical epic
Another Life,
the voice binds
divided realms within a radiant and lyric factuality. Increasingly,
