Copyright Notice
University of Southampton staff and students are reminded that copyright subsists in this extract
and the work from which it was taken.
This Digital Copy has been made under the terms of a CLA licence which allows you to:
• access and download a copy
• print out a copy
This Digital Copy and any digital or printed copy supplied to or made by you under the terms of
this Licence are for use in connection with this Course of Study. You may retain such copies after
the end of the course, but strictly for your own personal use.
All copies (including electronic copies) shall include this Copyright Notice and shall be destroyed
and/or deleted if and when required by the University.
Except as provided for by copyright law, no further copying, storage or distribution (including by email) is permitted without the consent of the copyright holder.
The author (which term includes artists and other visual creators) has moral rights in the work and
neither staff nor students may cause, or permit, the distortion, mutilation or other modification of
the work, or any other derogatory treatment of it, which would be prejudicial to the honour or
reputation of the author.
Hamner, R. "Derek Walcott's Omeros", From Bates, Catherine (2010) The Cambridge
companion to the epic. Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, pp. 234-245.

Name of Designated Person authorising scanning: Liesbeth Meilink

Course of Study for which scanned (course code): ENGL 1080

ISBN (of book) or ISSN (of journal): 9780521707367

Source (indicate one): A
A. original owned by University of Southampton
C. copyright fee paid copy
D. supplied by another licensed institution (state name)
Barcode: 1694256-1001
PN 1303 BAT
IJ
ROBERT HAMNER
Derek Walcott's Omeros
Derek Walcott's Omeros
vigour and elation, the vulgar, lurid reality of Homer's Greece before
its lionization through history and art. 'The freshness, the truth of the
Archipelago .. . has nothing to do with the figure that we call Homer.' 2
Omeros is written in homage to the islands of the Caribbean and their
down-to-earth people, who live beautifully without commemoration in
historical monuments or literary masterpieces.
Characterization and motive
Centuries of critical study have established a working consensus regarding
the standard components of the classical epic. At the same time, centuries of
writers have produced subtle changes and experimental variations so that
this venerable genre turns out to be more flexible than academic purists
might prefer. As early as Dante, the elevated heritage of the epic managed
to survive the insertion of the poet as a participant in the action. Later the
definition has been expanded in order to accommodate the prose of Melville
and then Joyce, with common seamen or citizens of Dublin as protagonists.
Over time the idea of heroic action has undergone serious re-evaluation,
and our postmodern age questions the legitimacy of any hierarchical literary
canon.
Against this fluid background, Derek Walcott published his extended
West Indian narrative poem, Omeros, in 1990. Whereas predecessors in
the epic field might depend upon a cohesive national, racial, or spiritual
framework, Walcott assembles his story out of the detritus of imperial
exploitation and colonial neglect. Born on the tiny island of St Lucia in
the Lesser Antilles (1930), the mulatto descendant of European masters and
African slaves, he writes of fragmented cultures and uprooted peoples
dealing with life in their marginalized corner of the world. W ith such an
unpromising point of departure, the initial challenge is in drawing out the
relevance of their struggle. On this point Walcott is explicit.'The conceit
behind history, the conceit behind art, is its presumption to be able to
elevate the ordinary, the common, and therefore the phenomenon. That's
the sequence: the ordinary and therefore the phenomenon, not the pheno­
menon and therefore its cause. But that's what life is really like . . . it is the
ordinariness, not the astonishment, that is the miracle.' 1 Elsewhere he tells
interviewers that he expects his deliberate evocation of Homer in the title
and multiple allusions to the Odyssey, Iliad, and Ulysses to distract scholars
from his central focus. All the classical paraphernalia eventually proves an
ironic point.What he wants in his poem is to recapture something of the
234
To enact his story, Walcott offers a cast of primary characters in roughly
three categories. The St Lucian peasantry is represented by a black Helen,
with her two suitors, Hector and Achille.One of their companions, Philoc­
tete, recalls Homeric Philoctetes in the incurable festering sore that often
leaves him in isolation.Walcott makes it clear that his is a racial wound, a
communal affliction that requires spiritual as well as physical healing. In
this circle is also the shopkeeper, Ma Kilman, who, because of her powers in
sorcery, is associated with St Lucia's cloud-topped Mount La Sorciere.
A second category of characters is represented by a pair of British colonia­
lists who settled in St Lucia shortly after the Second World War: Sergeant
Major (retired) Dennis Plunkett and his wife, Maud. Yet a third category
comprises two multi-dimensional figures. One is the blind, itinerant Seven
Seas, or Old St Omere (Omeros). The second transcendent character is the
Walcott narrator who, like Seven Seas, interacts with the islanders on
occasion, travels back and forth in time, and often steps beyond the margins
for intertextual commentary on the action.
Helen is the heart of this tale even more than her Greek counterpart in
the Iliad and the Odyssey. Not only is she the object of the conflict
between Hector and Achille on the peasant level of the story, but the
plight of this beautiful black woman who once served as maid to the
Plunketts inspires the immigrant Major to undertake writing the history
of her island. Above all, her central role is guaranteed when the poet/
narrator presents her as the embodiment of St Lucia. Island children are
taught in school that St Lucia is ' "The Helen Of The West" because she
was fought for so often by the French and British'.3 Western enterprise has
thus 'subordinated the island to foreign designs, even imposing classical
names within the population.Descendants of slaves forcibly transplanted
from Africa at best can claim only rootless genealogical branches.Conse­
quently, no small part of Helen's symbolic function is to raise the compli­
cated issue of posterity.She is pregnant, suspended between Hector and
Achille, and unsure of her expected child's paternity. In undertaking her
island's story, Major Plunkett wishes to right the wrongs of history, but at
235
ROBERT HAMNER
the same time diligent research fills a void in his marriage. As immigrants
he and Maud have voluntarily severed roots with their European heritage,
but more significantly their marriage has produced no offspring. Unantici­
pated compensation arises when records connected with Helen's history
lead to the name of a young midshipman Plunkett, who died during the
famous Battle of the Saints back in 1782. Thus coincidence ties the Major
to the island through the blood of an 'adopted' ·son. Complementing this
familial aspect of character motivation, Walcott introduces the ghost of his
father, Warwick, who died when he and his twin brother, Roderick, were
barely a year old. Through this ghostly reunion, Walcott acknowledges
his rudimentary artistic inspiration: his father undertook poetry, painting,
and drawing in this small island. The son now extends Warwick's ambition.
Appropriately, the ancestral thread weaves through the love triangle of
Helen, Hector and Achille. While he despairs over apparently losing Helen
to Hector, Achille experiences a sunstroke-induced trance returning him to
an African village where he encounters Afolabe, the tribal father who has
been lost in time through slavery. At first, this discovery links Achille as
never before to the African-influenced culture of his native island, but it
ultimately strengthens his personal attachment to Helen. At the end of the
narrative, after Hector's death in an automobile accident and Helen has
returned to Achille, we learn through Ma Kilman that her unborn child is
Hector's. By this time, however, that uncertainty is irrelevant. Achille has
been reconciled with his late rival, accepted Helen once more, and wishes to
raise their child under an African name.
Obviously these unassuming villagers lack the stature usually associated
with epics. Of the major characters, only one needs no lineal ancestor or
offspring, because he embodies a crucial literary ancestor. The blind Seven
Seas/Omeros, in keeping with Walcott's image of the vagabond Homeric
poet of the Aegean, is of the peasant class; but he is a timeless figure, a
sightless witness to the broad human struggle. He can materialize as an
African griot (bard), a Native American shaman on a Sioux reservation in
the 1890s, elsewhere as the animated statue of Homer in a St Lucian
inferno.Speaking of his attachment to these assorted villagers, Walcott tells
D. J. R. Bruckner, 'The whole book is an act of gratitude. It is a fantastic
privilege to be in a place in which limbs, features, smells, the lineaments and
presence of the people are so powerful ... One reason I don't like talking
about an epic is that I think it is wrong to try to ennoble people ... And just
to write history is wrong. History makes similes of people, but these people
are their own nouns. ' 4 Regardless of their marginal existence, one of
Walcott's primary objectives is to demonstrate that they do not have to be
heroic in stature to be significant.
236
.1..11.,..J."-'�
,.,u. ........, ...... ..... -· · ·- · .... �
Form and structure
Walcott's pointed objection to epic pretensions is in keeping with his reserva­
tions regarding history and art.As he explains in 'Reflections on Omeros', it is
presumptuous for a writer to think that his work somehow elevates the
ordinary.5 Having denied heroic proportions to his characters, he creates a
dilemma in recounting their interlocking stories. On the one hand, both the
Major and the narrative persona feel inspired to exonerate Helen. On the
other, that goal implies the inadequacy of her actuality. Central to the devel­
opment of the poem is the resolution of this problem.In traditional order, the
movement toward that essential clarification begins in the midst of things,
pursues the several conflicts, and closes on a note of elemental continuity.
Omeros is composed of sixty-four consecutively numbered chapters of three
cantos each, distributed over seven books.The pattern of loose hexametrical
three-line stanzas resembles Dante's terza rima form without maintaining the
standard interlocking rhyme scheme.6 In fact, Walcott employs such a variety
of permutations on near and multiple rhymes that Brad Leithauser concludes
Omeros might well serve as a casebook on rhyme.7 The lyrical play of tropes and
analogies ensures a measure of sensual and imaginative unity. However, as to the
larger scale of action, Walcott deliberately avoids a pattern of linear develop­
ment. He chooses instead to move about geographically and chronologically,
advancing various plotlines in segments. Form and content thus reinforce
each other, suggesting the multifaceted and broken history of the West Indies.
The opening scene involves Philoctete, already healed of his wound,
soliciting tourist money by telling about fishermen ritualistically converting
trees into the pirogues (dugout canoes) that are necessary to sustain their way
of life. The story then elides into the actions of fishermen cutting and shaping
new pirogues back when Philoctete suffered alone, unable to accompany his
friends when they leave the shore. As with his Greek namesake, Philoctete's
role is communal. His wound represents the affliction of his race.His anchor­
shaped lesion, located where shackles might have eaten into a man's flesh,
evokes the Atlantic crossing that reduced their ancestors to slaves. Signifi­
cantly, Philoctete is the centre of the only political scene in the poem.While he
campaigns on behalf of Maljo versus Compton, he regrets the factions
dividing his countrymen. The carnivalesque atmosphere of the contest language flavoured with puns, wry humour, and exaggerations typical of
calypso contests - cannot detract from Philoctete's concern for his island.
As he travels from village to village, he longs for reconciliation:
Why couldn't they love the place, same way, together,
the way he always loved her, even with his sore?
Love Helen like a wife in good and bad weather. 8
237
In the sequence of healings that take place in the poem, it is significant
that Philoctete's comes first. Ma Kilman discovers the lost African herb
necessary to the seawater bath in which he must be baptized; and his
transformation reflects not only the physical curing of his shin, but the
restoration of pride, overcoming centuries of loss and pain (246-8). His is
not one of the leading roles, yet after the burden lifts from his shoulders, the
way is cleared for others; just as in Greek mythology Philoctetes's cure and
reinstatement were necessary for victory over °Troy.
Although the central struggle in Omeros does not pit nation against
warring nation, the human scope is nonetheless expansive for being couched
in personal terms. Only a few pages into Omeros, the fishermen about
whom Philoctete began speaking are seen launching their pirogues for
another day on the sea. On this particular morning, Hector picks a fight
with Achille over the possession of a rusty bailing tin. The real point of
contention, however, traces back to their desire to win Helen. Her elusive­
ness motivates both men in different directions. Although in a moment of
anger she leaves Achille to live with Hector, he never feels that she belongs
to him. In order to impress her, Hector gives up the sea to drive a taxi, the
Comet, like a madman across the treacherous mountains of the island. His
occupational change brings money, but at great cost:
A man who cursed the sea had cursed his own mother.
Mer was both mother and sea.
( 23 1)
The crucial event for Achille, as he yearns to reclaim Helen, takes the form
of a sunstroke-induced voyage back in time to tribal Africa.
While he and his mate sail farther out than their usual fishing grounds,
Achille falls into a trance. There he is drawn by a sea-swift, reversing the
slavers' Middle Passage to Africa. In the crossing he envisions drowned gener­
ations of nameless brothers, then a midshipman Plunkett, and at the spectre of
his father's face, 'for the first time, he asked himself who he was' (128, 130).
Eventually landing before an African river village, he recognizes his own facial
lineaments in Afolabe, his tribal ancestor. Afolabe asks if his newly found son
knows the meaning of the name he now bears. When he cannot answer,
Afolabe explains that men without names have no substance, cast no shadow:
238
The gravity of that amnesia weighs both on the forgotten tribesmen and on
their vanished children.
At this point, Walcott reverses a crucial fortune-telling scene from Virgil's
Aeneid. Whereas Anchises in Hades foretells his son's founding of glorious
Rome, Walcott's Achille, knowing what lies ahead, protectively conceals
from his forefather the degrading future of slavery. As a result of his
visionary dream, however, Achille now has his amnesia erased, relearning
the rituals of his forgotten race, recognizing elements of his own island's
dances and musical instruments:
the same chac-chac and ra-ra, the drumming the same,
and the chant of the seed-eyed prophet the same
response from the blurring ankles.The same, the same. ( 143)
He witnesses a neighbouring tribe capture prisoners to sell as slaves, hears
the village griot's doleful litany, and retraces three hundred years of the
Atlantic passage to the shore he has known from childhood. In spite of the
bleakness, however, Achille comes to a realization that might well provide
the epigraph for Omeros:
But they crossed, they survived. There is the epical splendour.
Multiply the rain's lances, multiply their ruin,
the grace born from subtraction ...
(149)
Out of that dream, Achille emerges more whole than he has ever been, more
worthy of Helen and all she represents. During Achille's protracted absence,
Helen also undergoes transformation. Her longing for Achille draws out
time until she waits, 'Not Helen now, but Penelope' (153). The indecisive­
ness suspending her between rival suitors gives way and one must prevail.
Hector, cut off from the life-giving sea, sensing Helen's true feelings, loses
control of his Comet and dies off a narrow mountain road. At his funeral,
Achille pays tribute to a respected companion, laying on his grave an oar
and the same bailing cup over which they once almost came to blows.
The third major subplot is launched as early as the fifth chapter, as Dennis
Plunkett glimpses Helen passing by in a striking yellow dress that once
belonged to Maud. Her attitude, pride, had already caused her dismissal
from their household:
'And therefore, Achille, if I pointed and I said, There
is the name of that man, that tree, and this father,
would every sound be a shadow that crossed your ear,
Her head was lowered; she seemed to drift like a waif,
not like the arrogant servant that ruled their house.
It was at that moment that he felt a duty
without the shape of a man or a tree? What would it be?'
(And just as branches sway in the dusk from their fear
of amnesia, of oblivion, the tribe began to grieve). (138)
towards her hopelessness, something to redress
(he punned relentlessly) that desolate beauty
so like her island's. He drained the foaming Guinness.
239
Derek Walcott's Umeros
ROBERT HAMNER
He smiled at the mythical hallucination
that went with the name's shadow; the island was once
named Helen; its Homeric association
rose like smoke from a siege; the Battle of the Saints
was launched with that sound, from what was the 'Gibraltar
of the Caribbean', after thirteen treaties.·
(29-30, 31)
Duty is important to Plunkett, having served under Montgomery in Africa.
He, like Philoctete also bears a scar, his from a head wound suffered in
battle that led him to Maud, his nurse, who became his wife.Their decision
to leave the metropolitan centre and settle in one of the small corners of the
waning British Empire requires a delicate balancing act. One manifestation
of Plunkett's old wound is another kind of racial insecurity. Guilt as well as
duty prompts his obligation to Helen.
As a structural component, Plunkett's role is not only to represent the white
presence in Caribbean life but to interrogate established Western values.
There is no amnesia for a representative of the ruling class. His research,
however, leads him to reorient the established version of history. As a
Sergeant Major he expresses contempt for higher officers, and he ridicules
the 'phony pukka tones of ex-patriates' at the local Victoria club (25). His
being a pig farmer also affords another of Walcott's subtle epic allusions.
When Odysseus finally makes landfall back in Ithaca, it is his faithful swine­
herd Eumaios who gives him shelter and assists in restoring his kingdom.
If there is no throne to reclaim for Helen, Plunkett can still assemble the
facts about the British victory in the Battle of the Saints to establish her
broader significance. His enthusiasm can be sweeping when he imagines
'Homeric coincidence'. On one occasion he calls to Maud:
'Look, love, for instance,
near sunset, on April 12, hear this, the Ville de Paris
struck her colours tO Rodney. Surrendered. Is this chance
or an echo? Paris gives the golden apple, a war is
fought for an island called Helen?' - clapping conclusive hands.
(roo)
Moreover, there is his Plunkett namesake among the recorded fatalities to
give him a blood tie with her island's history.
Just as Plunkett's England, Maud's Ireland, and Achille's African roots
suggest disparate sources of West Indian culture, their story lines regularly
feed into each other. Midshipman Plunkett, before his duty in the
Caribbean, had conducted reconnaissance for Admiral Rodney in the
Netherlands. One of the slaves involved in fortifying St Lucia against
240
the French was born Afolabe.It is Rodney who renames him Achilles. As
simply as that, a classical allusion replaces an African name eventually to
be Creolized in local pronunciation to 'A-sheel'.Late in the story - Achille
and Helen rejoined, Philoctete now healed - Achille shares with Helen
from his dream the African meanings behind the island ceremonies they
have been practising in ignorance for generations (275).When Maud dies,
her funeral unites the community across racial lines. In attendance at the
service, the authorial persona wonders at Achille's obvious empathy for
the stricken Plunkett: 'Where was it from, this charity of soul ...?' (265).
In the depths of his suffering, the Major seeks Ma Kilman's spiritual inter­
vention. At their seance, when Ma Kilman assures him Maud is now in a
green place near a silver lake, he imagines Glen-da-Lough in her beloved
Ireland, and knows 'That moment bound him for good to another race'
(307). His lingering wound eases, he appreciates a new closeness to his
workmen and, most significant for the narrative core of Omeros, he recog­
nizes the fallacy of his attitude toward Helen. She certainly needs no histor­
ical validation: 'when he thought of Helen I she was not a cause or a cloud,
only a name I for a local wonder' (309).Her existence is sufficient without
reference to another culture's monuments or achievements.
For much of the coalescence of movements in Omeros, Ma Kilman is a
major force.As with the rest of her countrymen, fragmented cultures drift
through her mind.When she overhears the unintelligible mutterings of Old
St Omere, the words 'were Greek to her. Or old African babble' (18).
Although she regularly attends Mass, remnants of lost African gods retain
their subtle influence beneath the rituals and teaching of Catholicism. Her
concern for Philoctete's suffering draws her mind back to ancient African
folk remedies, but the ingredients elude her until on the way to Mass one
evening a trail of ants draws her off course and into the mountains. They
lead her to a foul-smelling, anchor-shaped plant, the seed of which had been
carried by a swift from Africa and ejected onto the island's soil (239).
Reverting to lost homeopathic arts, Ma Kilman performs the rites necessary
to claim the power of the transplanted herb. In the scene, generations are
conjured up as she is thrown into gyrations eliciting both the obeah-women
of the New World and the sibyl of ancient Cumae (245). Newly attuned to
the curative influence of her forgotten predecessors, Ma Kilman proceeds to
release Philoctete from his affliction as she would later minister to the needs
of Dennis Plunkett. As the poem draws to a close, many of the villagers
gather in her No Pain Cafe. There Ma Kilman reveals that Helen's child
comes from Hector; there Seven Seas/Omeros promises 'We shall all heal'
(319). The grace note of the final scene evokes transcendence within the
ordinary. After a long day of fishing, when Achille cleans up his equipment
241
before returning home to Helen we are assured, 'When he left the beach the
sea was still going on' (325).
Narrative perspective
An epic comprises more than performers of feats and unfolding action.
Regardless of Walcott's insistence that his authorial intrusions disqualify
Omeros as an epic, a storyteller's perspective, no matter how 'objective' or
remote, must have its place. 9 In Omeros, the shaping voice rises to the
surface early, is explicit, and integral to the overall experience of the poem.
In time-honoured fashion, Walcott has points to make. If Omeros has
elements of didacticism, it is simply in a more secular mode than the Divine
Comedy or Paradise Lost, where the ghost of Virgil or an angel materializes
to guide Dante or Milton's Adam towards enlightenment and salvation. It is
significant, because of his frequent epic denials, that in his first authorial
intervention, Walcott introduces a West Indian etymology for his title. After
his Greek lover instructs him in the authentic pronunciation for Homer's
name, '0-meros', he muses:
and O was the conch-shell's invocation, mer was
both mother and sea in our Antillean patois,
os, a grey bone, and the white surf as it crashes
and spreads its sibilant collar on a lace shore .
(14)
Walcott first steps among his peasant characters when he simultaneously
witnesses with Major Plunkett Helen's momentous entrance on the
beach (23). Subsequently, both men launch their tributes to this striking
woman - one historical, the other literary, the very poem we are reading.
Providing background for Plunkett also brings the first intertextual aside
regarding the author's creative intention:
This wound I have stitched into Plunkett's character.
He has to be wounded, affliction is one theme
of this work, this fiction, since every 'I' is a
fiction finally. Phantom narrator, resume.
(28)
The account he resumes integrates elements of his putative autobiography
into the design of the poem and occasionally into his representative charac­
ters.His is another of the journeys to be undertaken toward healing and
deeper understanding.
Chapter 12 introduces one of the most basic influences on Walcott's
career, the remnants of verse and painting left behind by his late father.
242
The appearance of Warwick's ghost, frozen at the age of his death, presents
a conundrum. With a son twice Warwick's age carrying on his avocation,
the question arises, whose verse, whose calling does he follow. The answer:
'"Sir" - I swallowed - "they are one voice"'. Affinities carry over in their
shared appreciation for coincidences and puns. Warwick toys with the fact
that his name is the same as William Shakespeare's home county; his 'Will'
left to Derek is the 'foreign machinery known as Literature'. Moreover,
Warwick died on Shakespeare's birth date, of a disease 'like Hamlet's old
man's spread from an infected ear ... Death imitating Art, eh?' (68, 69).
Of greater consequence for the advancement of the poem, Warwick's ghost
duplicates the role Aflchises served his son Aeneas: enunciating his calling.
Conjuring up images from Walcott's childhood of remarkable black women
hauling baskets of coal up gangways of merchant ships in the harbour of
Castries, Warwick delivers his charge:
Kneel to your load, then balance your staggering feet
and walk up that coal ladder as they do in time,
one bare foot after the next in ancestral rhyme.
... and your duty
from the time you watched them from your grandmother's house
as a child wounded by their power and beauty
is the chance you now have, to give those feet a voice.
(7 5-6)
Pointedly, Walcott's mission is not to serve an empire, but to give utterance
to the overlooked worthiness of the disenfranchized upon whose backs
empires have been built.
The African bloodline is only half of Walcott's mulatto heritage.
He editorializes during Achille's African dream that half of him is with
Achille, the other half with Midshipman Plunkett in the Netherlands
(135). St Lucia's location in the New World also prompts acknowledgment
of the influence of North American history. Life and the poem explicitly
follow parallel paths as Book 3 ends with the poet departing for Boston;
below his plane is Achille's lateen sail bearing for Gros Islet village ( 168).
Book 4 opens in Brookline, Massachusetts, where Walcott lived while
teaching at Boston University. His persona is suffering the pangs of divorce,
so that grief and loneliness eventually find imaginative outlet in the plight
of Native Americans and Catherine Weldon, a sympathizer who abandoned
her white privileges in the east to cast her lot with Sitting Bull and his
starving Sioux people in the Dakotas. ro In keeping with his other characters,
the poet is also afflicted, bearing his own wounds from divorce, but he
retains a sense of proportion. In his mind the many government treaties
243
broken with the tribes and his own tattered marriage vows materialize as
falling snow on the western plains.
Walcott's odyssey turns eastwards at the close of Book 4, prompted by the
second appearance of Warwick's shade. Having previously verbalized his
son's artistic obligations, Warwick now directs him to tour the storied sites
of the Old World, Lisbon, London, Dublin, the Aegean. His objective is
pointed:
'Once you have seen everything and gone everywhere,
cherish our island for its green simplicities,
...The sea-swift vanishes in rain,
and yet in its travelling all that the sea-swift does
it does in a circular pattern. Remember that, son'. (187-8)
The advice bears fruit. Upon his return to the island, his perspective under­
goes a crucial change. His conversion anticipates that of Dennis Plunkett as
he begins to recognize self-centredness in his devotion to Helen. He
wonders,
...Didn't I want the poor
to stay in the same light so that I could transfix
them in amber, the afterglow of an empire ... ? (227)
He and Plunkett were both wrong in imposing their designs on Helen (271).
Their kinship is deeper than ideological, as well. Among the figures he
has created, Walcott confides that there are vestiges of Plunkett in his
father, Maud in his mother, and Telemachus in him (263). Embedded in
the elaborate fictional expressions is a core of reality. At last, the epic
paraphernalia must be cleared away in order to seize the authentic proper­
ties of Caribbean life. This growing conviction is reinforced during an
encounter with the animated statue of Omeros. Walcott's reincarnation of
Homer is sage but amiable, and conversant in the local patois. In discussing
the underlying motive of heroic poetry, his mentor admits the Trojan War
was an excuse for an epic, and while the love of a woman is good, 'the love
of your own people is greater' (284). Furthermore, Omeros informs him
that his life has pursued two journeys: one carrying him through great cities
of the world while the other remained motionless involving a desk, paper,
and pen:
The walking statue then leads the narrator through the purgatorial inferno
of volcanic Soufriere's crater on the west coast of the island, so that his
vision is finally clarified.
In the end, the poet admits the vanity of his objectification of Helen.
Achille will never be able to read this poem, but he lives an inoffensive,
fruitful life, and that is sufficient. No matter what Walcott can give to his
native island as son and artist, all pales in comparison with what the
archipelago has given him. For his purposes, Walcott attempts neither to
copy nor to parody Homeric tradition. Gregson Davis convincingly argues
that his rhetorical disavowal of epic formulae is itself a classical ploy: setting
the reader 'a generic foil to the poet's articulation of his/her project'. n
Regardless of the fact that the status of Omeros as an epic may be
questioned, the poem arises from a remarkable people and gives utterance
to their place in the world.
NO TES
1 Derek Walcott, 'Reflections on Omeros', South Atlantic Quarterly 96 (1997):
2 33·
2 Robert Brown and Cheryl Johnson, 'An Interview with Derek Walcott', Cream
City Review 14 (1990): 216.
3 Walcott, 'Leaving School', London Magazine 5 (1965): 4.
4 D.J.R. Buckner, 'A Poem in Homage to an Unwanted Man', New York Times
(9 October 1990): 13.
5 Walcott, 'Reflections', 233.
6 J.P. White, 'An Interview with Derek Walcott', Green Mountain Review
ns. 4 (1990): 36.
7 Brad Leithauser, 'Ancestral Rhyme', New Yorker (11 February 1991): 93.
8 Walcott, Omeros (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1990), 108. Hereafter
cited by page number in text.
9 Bruce King, Derek Walcott: A Caribbean Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2000), 519; and White, 'Interview', 36.
ro King, Derek Walcott, 519.
II Gregson Davis, "'With No Homeric Shadow": The Disavowal of Epic in Derek
Walcott's Omeros', The South Atlantic Quarterly 96 (1997): 324.
'Therefore, this is what this island has meant to you,
why my bust spoke, why the sea-swift was sent to you:
to circle yourself and your island with this art'. (291)
244
245