Walcott recognises poetry as another dialect. Though the tone ofOmerosis oral
throughout, the language is, except in some of the direct speech, firmly in the poetic dialect. It is allegorical, determinedly metaphorical and musical. While true mimesis is perhaps an unattainable goal, poetry’s duty is to speak as clearly as it can, ‘a
language that went beyond mimicry, a dialect which had the force of revelation as it invented names for things, one which finally settled on its own mode of inflection.’27 However, this does not lead him so close to the vernacular that he adopts Brathwaite’s position on ‘nation-language’. He had difficulty with aspects of the negritude
tendency of which nation-language was a part. He saw falseness in attempts to adopt a culture from the past that modern West Indians had not experienced.
Brathwaite stresses literature’s originally oral nature and the particular appropriate- ness of the oral form to the Caribbean. What he callstotal expressiongrows out of
the griot tradition and the poverty of the community, where they only have their breath, their immanence, to express themselves.28 Walcott said much the same to Ciccarelli: ‘West Indian society is within an oral tradition. This is a question of
26 Maria Cristina Fumagalli,The Flight of the Vernacular, pp 108 and 278 27
Derek Walcott,What the Twilight Says: Essays, p 15.
literacy rather than intelligence…Story-telling, singing, and other forms of tribal entertainment continue with such phenomena as the calypso tents. That tradition is also African’.29
He adopted the martyr’s role, ‘dedicated to purifying the language of the
tribe…jumped on by both sides for pretentiousness or playing white.’30 At the same time, he works to avoid elevating the tone, ironically given his satirical lines in
Epitaph for the Young: ‘We’ll drink to any West Indian who/Strips speech of tie and
socks.’31
Walcott rejects the idea that the vernacular (literally ‘of the home-born slave’) need be either the fragmentary relics of long-lost African tongues or the imperial speech of the slave-owner and colonist. Callahan suggests creoles are fresh languages, occupying ground that formerly belonged to the empires and subversive by definition.32 What Walcott is about is producing a creole of creoles, one that can be universally
understood and that encompasses not just the various englishes of the Caribbean, but also the vestiges of African dialect that survive,33the lilt and tone of French Creole and the richness and freshness of imagery to be found in demotic speech and good poetry everywhere.
29 Derek Walcott, interviewed by Sharon Ciccarelli, reprinted inConversations with Derek Walcott, p.
35.
30 Derek Walcott,What the Twilight Says: Essays, p. 8. 31
Derek Walcott,Epitaph for the Young(reprinted inAgenda Vol. 39 Nos. 1-3), p. 44.
32 Lance Callahan,In the Shadows of Divine Perfection. Derek Walcott’s Omeros.(New York and
London: Routledge, 2003) p. 5.
33 As in ‘chac-chac’ or ‘shack-shack’, the rattle, which has a Yoruba equivalent/precursor in ‘seke-
seke’ (Richard Allsopp,Dictionary of Caribbean English Usage(Kingston: University of the West Indies Press, 2003)
11. Prosody
Shiftiness and heft
11.1 Metre
Walcott has always shown himself ready to adapt conventional forms. As early as his sonnets in ‘Tales of the Islands’, as well as turning the sonnet structure on its head, he combines lyric and narrative forms in a way that comes to full fruition inOmeros.1
His prosody is a subtle craft that resists metrical analysis. His motive for this may be guessed at from his comment to Edward Hirsch about his 1984 collectionMidsummer,
‘For a poem, if you give a poem personality, that’s the most exciting thing – to feel that it is becoming anti-melodic. The vocabulary becomes even more challenging, the meter more interesting, and so on.’2
Commentators onOmeros have seen in it a rhyme-driven verse-form and a music of
the sea,3syllabatonic (sic) verse,4a phrasal prosody relying on Aeolic and Sapphic figures,5the homemade texture of creole traditions,6a wavering rhythm mimicking drunkenness7and endless variation, a syncopation.8 Walcott himself refers to it repeatedly as hexameter andterza rima,9 10and on one occasion as ‘my rough
1 Derek Walcott,In a Green Night, pp. 26-30 andCollected Poems,pp. 22-27.
2 Derek Walcott, interviewed by Edward Hirsch,The Art of Poetry(1986), reprinted inCritical
Perspectives on Derek Walcott, p. 83.
3
Brad Leithauser,Ancestral Rhyme(New Yorker 66, 11 February 1991), p. 94
4 Lance Callahan,In the Shadows of Divine Perfection, p. 12. 5 Lance Callahan,In the Shadows of Divine Perfection, pp. 51-52. 6 Paul Breslin,Nobody’s Nation: Reading Derek Walcott, p. 245. 7
Christopher Benfey, ‘Coming Home’ (The New Republic, 29 October 1990), p. 38.
8 Charles W Pollard,New World Modernisms: T S Eliot, Derek Walcott and Kamau Brathwaite, p.
167.
9 Derek Walcott, interviewed by Luigi Sampietro,Caribana 3, A Review of Caribbean Literatures.
1992/93.
hexameter, which is in Homer and my roughterza rima,which is in Dante.11 He has
said, ‘I do not recognise literary devices. I cannot name metres. I am not interested in the nomenclature of Latin scansions. I count on my fingers. Everything else is by accident, and I hope divine’.12This impatience with the meta-language of prosody cannot be taken to mean that he is deaf to the patterns that prosody attempts to identify.
With the exception of Chapter XXXIII, Section iii, which is in tetrameter and is discussed separately below, the poem is indeed in (rough) hexameter. This might be seen as moving the verse away from a close dependence on the later, Eurocentric norm of iambic pentameter and towards a ‘purer’ form, closer to classical figures and therefore to the Homeric and oral tradition, more in tune with modern Caribbean rhythmic culture and more distant from the colonial tradition.
However, Walcott has also said he chose the hexameter line because it allowed more freedom than the pentameter to drive the narrative forward, accelerating or relaxing as necessary and that the pentameter was a little conventional and pre-determined. He said, ‘I felt that the prose – the narrative experience in the poem – would’ve had less of a sort of epic echo if it were in hexameter as opposed to if it were in pentameter – in which it would already begin to certainly have echoes of Milton, or Tennyson […] And I don’t think that the pentameter would’ve allowed me the kind of prosaic space that I wanted for the action of the narration… I think that in the pentametrical measure
11 Derek Walcott,Reflections on ‘Omeros’ed. Gregson Davis, reprinted inThe Poetics of Derek
Walcott: Intertextual Perspectives, p. 244.
12
Derek Walcott, interviewed by Leif Sjöberg (Artes No 11983), reprinted inConversations with Derek Walcott, p. 82
ordinary things tend to get over-emphasised by the beat – I think. Whereasherethere
is more flexibility, more caesuras.’13
ComparingOmeroswith the pentameter of ‘The SchoonerFlight’(1979), the
difference in tone is marked. Though the latter is more loosely rhymed, it feels highly compressed, almost hectic. Caesurae are less prominent and much of the sense is end- stopped so that the lines come staccato. Often, the lines hesitate between tetrameter and pentameter, giving strength to Walcott’s comment about the beat. InMidsummer
(1984) and ‘The Light of the World’ (1987)14, Walcott’s pentameter takes a more relaxed form in which any variation in stresses is more often upward.
As Roberts has pointed out, Walcott’s hexameter is by no means the classical Alexandrine of Spenser or Pope, with its prominent and invariable caesura.15 He applies the hexameter flexibly and it often varies from the 12 syllables/6 stresses of the classic alexandrine. There are 16-syllable lines, even 17-syllable ones in
XXVII/i/1 and XXVIII/iii/1, while 4- and 5-stress lines occur fairly frequently, clearly intended to draw attention to a passage (e.g. in II/iii/3). His use of caesurae is
examined later in this section but is also far from classical.
This metrical variety can raise problems for the prosodist seeking to apply foot scansion but the unity of the poem is not disturbed by such fluidity.
11.2 Form
13 Derek Walcott, interviewed by Luigi Sampietro,Caribana 3. 14
Derek Walcott,The Arkansas Testament, p. 48.
Just as Walcott’s hexameters are seen as Homeric homage, his use ofterza rima is
considered Dantesque, acknowledging the debt the poem owes to Homer and Dante for some of its symbolism and references (Fumagalli points out thatterza rimawas of
Dante’s invention).16Walcott referred to them as ‘like a combination of a Homeric line and a Dantesque design.’17 His claim to be using theterza rimaform has been
accepted by commentators, but is not completely convincing. Breslin says, ‘there is no consistent pattern of linking rhyme to bind the tercets together’ and calls it ‘a loose approximation of Dante’s tightly woventerza rima.’18 The apparent variety is
accepted; Dante, too, extended the form with additional rhymes. No-one seems to have realised that the form Walcott uses is unique to himself and much more regular than it seems at first sight.
Of histerza rima, Walcott has said, ‘quatrains wouldn’t have been as good because
the quatrain is too self-completing. It doesn’t give you a propulsion into the next stanza like theterza-rimadoes…Rhyme is a propulsion…It pushes. It doesn’t stop.’19
However, he had also said in 1986, only a year or so before beginningOmeros, ‘I find
myself wanting to write very simply cut, very contracted, very speakable and very challenging quatrains in rhymes. Any other shape seems ornate, an elaboration on that essential cube that really is the poem.’20 Much ofThe Arkansas Testament,
published in 1987, is written in rhyming quatrains and in his playThe Odyssey,
written in 1991/2, shortly afterOmeroswas published, Walcott reverted to the
quatrain, staying with it (as pairs of couplets) inTiepolo’s Houndin 2000.
16 Maria Cristina Fumagalli,The Flight of the Vernacular, p. 9. 17
Derek Walcott, interviewed by Luigi Sampietro,Caribana 3.
18 Paul Breslin,Nobody’s Nation,p. 245.
19 Derek Walcott, interviewed by Luigi Sampietro,Caribana 3.
20 Derek Walcott, interviewed by Edward Hirsch, quoted inThe Art of Poetry XXXVII, Paris Review
101(1986), pp 196-230 and cited by Rei Terada inDerek Walcott’s Poetry: American Mimicry, p. 176.
Walcott combines formality with a relaxed virtuosity that conceals the form at times. Even so, we might have expected the characteristicterza rimarhyme pattern of
aba/bcb/cdcto appear before Stanzas 9-10 ofOmeros. We certainly might expect to
have more than three or four isolated examples in the whole of Chapter One and the same in Chapter Two. Less than 6% of these two chapters is in what Dante might have calledterza rima.
Overall,even including Walcott’s inventive use of reverseterza rima, (where the
rhyming is notaba/bcbbutaba/cac/dcd, see XXX/ii/1-2) or interlockingterza rima
(where the rhyming isaba/bab, see XXXVIII/i/1-2 and also 3-4) the form is used in
only 200 stanzas or so, less than 10% of the poem. Though there are fragments in the form of individual tercet-pairs, these rarely extend beyond that, the longest passage being IX/ii/2-9, where two normalterza rimagroups bracket four examples of the
reverse form.
The dominant form inOmerosis in fact the regularly rhyming quatrain, but this has
been concealed by dividing the lines into groups of three rather than four.
There are some 1100 quatrains, spread over a tercet skeleton and occupying some 1500 stanzas, maybe 60% of the poem. Sustained passages are frequent and lengthy. This rhyme scheme is one that Walcott used 20 years earlier in his poem ‘The Gulf’21 but did not use again untilOmeros. That none of the commentators has remarked
upon this feature of Walcott’s rhyming inOmerosis indicative of the success of this
technique and of his use of near-rhyme in concealing regularity. He used the same scheme in the first section of his next volume of new poetry,The Bounty, in 1997.
Though he sought theterza rimaform forOmeros, his inclination both before and
after 1987-1989 when it was being written was towards quatrains and he never really relinquished them. By spreading rhyming quatrains over tercets inOmeros, Walcott
achieves his aim of rhyme driving across stanza boundaries, but retains the quatrain element he was inclining towards in 1986.
It is interesting that his comment on writingThe Odysseycould almost apply to
Omerosas well: ‘I was not going to do it in pentameter because that would have had
Elizabethan echoes. I made up my mind I would do it in quatrains, for the discipline and containment of it, that I would do it in hexameters, and that what I was after was a huge poem.’22