670
PARTISAN REVIEW
A pack of cigarettes had dropped from my pocket.
He gave it to me. I turned, hiding my tears.
There was nothing they wanted, nothing I could give them
But this thing I have called "The Light of the World."
The "Elsewhere" section of the book takes us into a colder climate,
both poetically and geographically. Many of these poems, especially "Eulogy
to W. H. Auden," "Steam," "Elsewhere," and "Central America" have the
feel of public occasions, and two poems, "Tomorrow, Tomorrow" and
"Fame," deal explicitly with that alienation and rootlessness which are among
the burdens of a public career.
The crucial poem in this section is the book's title poem, in which the
poet attempts to come to terms with a history very different from the one
that has traditionally concerned him. Visiting Fayetteville, Arkansas, the poet
wakes before dawn in his motel room and prowls the town in search of cof–
fee. Before he finds his coffee, he brushes up against the still-sharp edges of
American racism.
Walcott is particularly acute in registering how that racism tinges mo–
ments where it is not the explicit matter. Here, for instance, he describes the
icy politeness and constraint caused by his entering a cafeteria:
A tall black cook setting glazed
pies, a beehive-blond waitress,
lips like a burst strawberry
and her "Mornin'" like maple syrup.
Four DEERE caps talking deer hunting.
I looked for my own area.
The muttering decanter
had all I needed; it could sigh for
Sherman's smoking march to Atlanta
or the march to Montgomery.
I was still nothing. A cipher
in its bubbling black zeroes, here.
What finally stands out in this poem is a set of questions which at first
appear to be rhetorical ones. Can the poet pledge allegiance to a flag that has
been borne by Klansmen? Does the aging Democracy of the United States
"remember its log-cabin dream, / the way that a man past fifty / imagines a
