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    Midsummer
    Midsummer
    Midsummer
    Ebook76 pages1 hour

    Midsummer

    By Derek Walcott

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    About this ebook

    The poems in this sequence of fifty-four were written to encompass one year, from summer to summer. Their principal themes are the stasis, both stultifying and provocative, of midsummer in the tropics; the pull of the sea, family, and friendship on one whose cricumstances lead to separation; the relationship of poetry to painting; and the place of a poet between two cultures.

    Walcott records, with his distinctive linguistic blend of soaring imagery and plainly stated facts, the experience of a mid-lief period--in reality and in memory or the imagination. As Louis Simpson wrote on the publication of Wacott's The Fortunate Traveller, "Walcott is a spellbinder. Of how many poets can it be said that their poems are compelling--not a mere stringing together of images and ideas but language that delights in itself, rhythms that seem spontaneous, scenes that are vividly there?...The poet who can write like this is a master."

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMacmillan Publishers
    Release dateSep 9, 2014
    ISBN9781466880436
    Midsummer
    Author

    Derek Walcott

    Derek Walcott nació en 1930 en Claistres, capital de la antigua colonia británica de Santa Lucía, una isla en las Pequeñas Antillas. Hijo de un pintor británico que murió cuando él contaba un año de edad y nieto de esclavos, a esta mezcla de culturas hay que añadir que su familia fuera protestante en una comunidad donde predominaba el catolicisimo. Estudió en el University College of the West Indies. Es fundador de Trinidad Theater Workshop, y autor de numerosas obras de teatro y libros de poesía. Entre sus obras traducidas al castellano figuran: Islas, El testamento de Arkansas, La voz del crepúsculo, La abundancia. En cuanto a Omeros, está considerada como su obra maestra y fue galardonada con el premio W. H. Smith. En 1992 le fue concedido el Premio Nobel. Foto © Lisbeth Salas

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      Book preview

      Midsummer - Derek Walcott

      PART ONE

      I

      The jet bores like a silverfish through volumes of cloud—

      clouds that will keep no record of where we have passed,

      nor the sea’s mirror, nor the coral busy with its own

      culture; they aren’t doors of dissolving stone,

      but pages in a damp culture that come apart.

      So a hole in their parchment opens, and suddenly, in a vast

      dereliction of sunlight, there’s that island known

      to the traveller Trollope, and the fellow traveller Froude,

      for making nothing. Not even a people. The jet’s shadow

      ripples over green jungles as steadily as a minnow

      through seaweed. Our sunlight is shared by Rome

      and your white paper, Joseph. Here, as everywhere else,

      it is the same age. In cities, in settlements of mud,

      light has never had epochs. Near the rusty harbor

      around Port of Spain bright suburbs fade into words—

      Maraval, Diego Martin—the highways long as regrets,

      and steeples so tiny you couldn’t hear their bells,

      nor the sharp exclamations of whitewashed minarets

      from green villages. The lowering window resounds

      over pages of earth, the canefields set in stanzas.

      Skimming over an ocher swamp like a fast cloud of egrets

      are nouns that find their branches as simply as birds.

      It comes too fast, this shelving sense of home—

      canes rushing the wing, a fence; a world that still stands as

      the trundling tires keep shaking and shaking the heart.

      II

      Companion in Rome, whom Rome makes as old as Rome,

      old as that peeling fresco whose flaking paint

      is the clouds, you are crouched in some ancient pensione

      where the only new thing is paper, like young St. Jerome

      with his rock vault. Tonsured, you’re muttering a line

      that your exiled country will soon learn by heart,

      to a flaking, sunlit ledge where a pigeon gurgles.

      Midsummer’s furnace casts everything in bronze.

      Traffic flows in slow coils, like the doors of a baptistry,

      and even the kitten’s eyes blaze with Byzantine icons.

      That old woman in black, unwrinkling your sheet with a palm,

      her home is Rome, its history is her house.

      Every Caesar’s life has shrunk to a candle’s column

      in her saucer. Salt cleans their bloodstained togas.

      She stacks up the popes like towels in cathedral drawers;

      now in her stone kitchen, under the domes of onions,

      she slices a light, as thick as cheese, into epochs.

      Her kitchen wall flakes like an atlas where, once,

      Ibi dracones was written, where unchristened cannibals

      gnawed on the dry heads of coconuts as Ugolino did.

      Hell’s hearth is as cold as Pompeii’s. We’re punished by bells

      as gentle as lilies. Luck to your Roman elegies

      that the honey of time will riddle like those of Ovid.

      Corals up to their windows in sand are my sacred

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