164
PARTISAN REVIEW
Walcott's will be a music of
things,
Monet-like splendor and formal
rigor, modulated by the sustained fiction of a unifying "I": "The marl
white road, the
Dorc~e
rushing cool/Through gorges of green cedars,
like the sound/Of infant voices from the Mission School,lLike leaves
like dim seas in the mind;
ici,
Choiseul/. . ."
Whether exploring his adopted "exile" in the United States or
his inherited colonial fracture, Walcott continually fingers distance.
Often it is distance between languages colliding and marrying: "Moi
c'est gens Sainte Lucie.lC'est la moi sorti;lIs there that I born."
("Sainte Lucie"). But such confrontations stand for cultures, for
worlds, and in theme as well Walcott measures his estrangements:
"The classics can console. But not enough." ("Sea Grapes"). Finally,
that alienation is seen as belonging not to the peculiar accident of
colonial
deracinement,
but to the very condition of modernity.
How then, these poems worry, can myth live, since the tradi–
tional gods come to us "dead on arrival" ("From This Far")?
It
is in
orchestrating his answer that Walcott displays his full daring. Ac–
cepting skepticism, ("... you see/through all that moonshine what
they really were,!these gods as seed-bulls, gods as rutting swans-Ian
overheated farmhand's literature"), he rediscovers myth in the con–
scious act of the imagination. After its deliberately debunking puns,
"Europe" concludes:
Nothing is there, just as it always was,
but the foam's wedge to the horizon-light,
then, wire-thin, the studded armature,
like drops still quivering on his matted hide,
the hooves and horn-points anagrammed in stars.
Metaphor and simile, linguistic acts, return the world to us in a
freshness apparently beyond language and inherited myth: the figure
standing in the door-light is"... not Nike loosening her sandals,!
but a girl slapping sand from her foot, one hand on the frame."
(Mid–
summer XXV).
Walcott sustains the illusion-for that is what it is,
art's true lie - by a language of extreme physicality: "the vowels curl
from the tongue of the carpenter's plane"
(Another Life).
The collusion
of world and word is frankly erotic: "now, lecherous, lecherous, sighed
the insucked water ..."
(Another Life) .
He sustains it also by dramatic
voice, whether of the poetlfatherllover/husband personae or of alter–
egos like Shabine and Spoiler: "... all you go bawl out, 'Spoil, things
ain't so bad.'/This ain't the Dark Age, is just Trinidad,!is human
