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Derek Walcott Response on Custos
The poem “The Star-Apple Kingdom” starts with this pastoral painting. How do you get from that to the Caribbean? From paint to words. Is that a fair transition? Are you asking too much of your readers that way? First of all tell me about custos. Derek Walcott replied saying “custos is an example of the things that happen in language in the Caribbean. A custos is a custodian. A Latin custos—custodoes meaning a god. It’s an old Jamaican word which may still be used for someone in charge of a parish, appointed by the government, I think. The custos of a parish is the guard.
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The Wind in the Dooryard Poem
I didn’t want this poem to come from the torn mouth, I didn’t want this poem to come from his salt body, but I will tell you what he celebrated: He writes of the wall with spilling coralita from the rim of the rich garden and the clean dirt yard clean as the parlour table with a yellow tree an ackee, an almond a pomegranate in the clear vase of sunlight;
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Derek Walcott Poetry: A Far Cry from Africa
A Far Cry From Africa By Derek Walcott, Nobel Literature Laureate, Saint Lucia, West Indies. 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?
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Derek Walcott Inspirational Plays
Cry for a Leader, produced in St. Lucia, 1950. Senza Alcum Sospetto (radio play), broadcast 1950, produced as Paolo and Francesca, in St. Lucia, 1951. (And director) Henri Christophe: A Chronicle in Seven Scenes (first produced in Castries, West Indies, 1950; produced in London, England, 1952), Barbados Advocate (Bridgetown, Barbados), 1950. Robin and Andrea, published in Bim (Christ Church, Barados), 1950. [more…] Three Assassins, produced in St. Lucia, West Indies, 1951. The Price of Mercy, produced in St. Lucia, West Indies, 1951. (And director) Harry Dernier: A Play for Radio Production (produced in Mona, Jamaica, 1952; radio play broadcast as Dernier, 1952), Barbados Advocate (Bridgetown, Barbados), 1952. (And director) The Wine of the Country (produced in Mona, Jamaica, 1956), University College of the West Indies (Mona,…
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Derek Walcott A Poet and a Visionary
He had an early sense of a vocation as a writer. In the poem “Midsummer” (1984), he wrote: “Forty years gone, in my island childhood, I felt that the gift of poetry had made me one of the chosen, that all experience was kindling to the fire of the Muse.” – Walcott At 14, Walcott published his first poem, a Miltonic, religious poem in the newspaper, The Voice of St Lucia. An English Catholic priest condemned the Methodist-inspired poem as blasphemous in a response printed in the newspaper. By 19, Walcott had self-published his two first collections with the aid of his mother, who paid for the printing: 25 Poems (1948)…
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Midsummer, Tobago
Broad sun-stoned beaches. White heat. A green river. A bridge, scorched yellow palms from the summer-sleeping house drowsing through August. Days I have held, days I have lost, days that outgrow, like daughters, my harbouring arms. Derek Walcott