When it comes to hearing the Holy Spirit, Derek Walcott finds it easier in Trinidad than in Boston.
Tag Archives: Derek Walcott
Imagining Little Ocean’s Future
Looking for the literary significance of my latest grandchild, I turn to Walcott, Whitman, Masefield, Coleridge, and Byron. What emerges is a mystical seeker.
Posted in Uncategorized Also tagged "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking", "Sea Fever", "Tales of the Islands", baby names, J. D. Salinger, John Masefield, John Milton, Laurence Sterne, Lord Byron, Lucille Clifton, Paradise Lost, Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, To Esme with Love and Squalor, Tristram Shandy, Walt Whitman, William Blake Comments closed
No Calendar Except for this Bountiful Day
Derek Walcott’s elegy to his mother unexpectedly doubles as a Commencement poem.
Posted in Uncategorized Also tagged "Bounty", commencement, elegies, graduations, Nature Comments closed
I Walk among the Rubbled Tales
To commemorate 9-11, I post Derek Walcott’s “A City’s Death by Fire,” written about another disaster. Walcott finds the hope of baptismal renewal amongst the destruction.
Pentecost Flames, Fireflies’ Crooked Street
Walcott turns to his Caribbean childhood, spent in Santa Lucia and Trinidad, to find God. It is as though his mind must travel there because he is having trouble hearing God in the cities, with their cold streetlamps lining the regulated sidewalks.
