Barack Obama and Derek Walcott

In the week after the presidential election much has been made in literary circles about a news photograph showing President-Elect Barack Obama, who had written some poetry as a student, carrying around Nobel Prize-winner Derek Walcott’s Collected Poems 1948-1984, perhaps received by Obama as a gift upon his victory. At the same time, on the day after the election Walcott released a new poem, “Forty Acres,” written for Obama and available to readers at the Times Online website.

Perhaps this is a fine occasion for all to revisit Walcott’s poetry, including “Sea Grapes,” the title poem from a collection published in 1976 and a piece that appears in the book held by Obama in the news photo. Derek Walcott can be seen reading “Sea Grapes” in the video clip above.

SEA GRAPES

That sail which leans on light,
tired of islands,
a schooner beating up the Caribbean

for home, could be Odysseus,
home-bound on the Aegean;
that father and husband’s

longing, under gnarled sour grapes, is
like the adulterer hearing Nausicaa’s name
in every gull’s outcry.

This brings nobody peace. The ancient war
between obsession and responsibility
will never finish and has been the same

for the sea-wanderer or the one on shore
now wriggling on his sandals to walk home,
since Troy sighed its last flame,

and the blind giant’s boulder heaved the trough
from whose groundswell the great hexameters come
to the conclusions of exhausted surf.

The classics can console. But not enough.

Adam Kirsch, in his recently released book of criticism, The Modern Element: Essays on Contemporary Poetry (W.W. Norton, 2008), writes of Derek Walcott: “Walcott’s constant theme, from his first poems to his very latest, has been the struggle to reconcile this poet’s freedom with the bonds of history. He has seldom seemed to doubt his powers; his is an enormous gift, probably the greatest of any poet now alive, and his career is an almost uninterrupted progress in mastery. The doubts were rather about his place, and assailed him from both sides: the colonialist exclusivity of whites, the nationalist exclusivity of blacks.” Kirsch further observes: “Walcott’s constant alertness to historical injustice is the necessary complement to his nostalgia for history.” Therefore, maybe Derek Walcott is equipped to empathize with Barack Obama in ways few poets might be able.

Readers will find additional information about Derek Walcott and analysis of his poetry in a pair of previous “One Poet’s Notes” posts: “Derek Walcott: Sixty Years of Poetry” and “Derek Walcott: The Prodigy.”