한국예이츠저널
DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.14354/yjk.1999.10.81

Vol. 10 (1999) 81­102
W. B. Yeats and Derek Walcott:
New Poetry and Tradition*
1)
Young Suck Rhee (Hanyang University-Seoul)
I made a song a coat
Covered with embroideries
Out of old mythologies
From heel to throat;
But the fools caught it,
Wore it in the world’s eyes
As though they’d wrought it.
Song, let them take it,
For there’s more enterprise
In walking naked.
W. B. Yeats, “A Coat”
―
....
I who have cursed
The drunken officer of British rule, how choose
Between this Africa and the English tongue I love?
Betray them both, or give back what they give?
How can I face such slaughter and be cool?
How can I turn from Africa and live?
― Derek Walcott, “A Far Cry from Africa”
I
Poetry and tradition go together. It is because poetry lives in and
through tradition. Poetic diction is no other than the flesh and blood and
년도 한양대학교 교내연구비의 지원으로 쓰여진 논문임.
* 1998
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bones of a mother tongue. It contains every nourishing ingredient in it.
Every race has a mother tongue. Without it, the spirit of a race dies
down; with it, a race rises and prospers.
The twentieth century has been fortunate enough to have some great
poets, including Yeats, Seamus Heaney, and Derek Walcott. They are all
English poets, all of them Nobel Prize winners. On second thoughts, are
they English-speaking poets? Yes and no. They are the poets who have
been Anglicized and at the same time changing the English language
through their new poetries. This paper will look into how the two poets do
that. [Heaney is not dealt with in this paper.]
The emphasis of the paper will be laid on the special features of the
two poets, Yeats and Walcott. Poetry is such a fine piece of art that it
may be impossible to dissect only a small portion of a poet, or only some
poems of him. However, as I have gone through the whole of the poetry
by each poet, I think I will do my best to select and analyze the special
part of him, which originates and diverges from tradition, so that a new
poetry may grow large and clear in the reader’s mind. The selection will
be made from the poems written through the whole of their poetic career,
including the early and late poems of importance - in Walcott’s case, the
latest as he is still writing. Then, the poems that make new histories will
be selected and studied. The paper devotes half of its space to Yeats and
the other half to Walcott, drawing a conclusion from my reading of the
select poems aiming at the special features of both poets. The conclusion
will, hopefully, posit both Yeats and Walcott at a certain point in the
history of poetry of England and America, as well as of Ireland and the
West Indies.
II
Let me start from the general information on Yeats and Walcott, as
entered in Oxford Companion to 20th Century Poetry in English (1996). As
W. B. Yeats and Derek Walcott: New Poetry and Tradition
83
it was published recently, I think the information is more objective. The
Yeats entry is fairly long and in detail, often listing some major critical
issues and including the recently published definitive books of poetry at
the end, whereas the Walcott item is less than a page long. Yet both of
the entries are well researched and clear. The summary aimed at showing
the relation of the two poets to tradition is as follows (Hamilton, Yeats:
593-7; Walcott: 564-5):
About William Butler Yeats (1856-1939):
Born in Dublin, son of the painter John Butler Yeats and Susan Pollexfen.
His family moved to London when he was 2, and back to Dublin when he was 16.
His childhood holidays were spent in County Sligo.
He studied at the Dublin Metropolitan School of Art from 1884 to 1886.
His first published poems appeared in the Dublin University Review in 1885.
His first volume of poems, The Wanderings of Oisin and Other Poems in 1889.
He was a founder-member of the Irish National Literary Society in 1892.
He was reading Sinnett’s Esoteric Buddhism in the mid-1880s, and joined the
Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn.
He met John O’Leary, the exiled Fenian leader who returned to Dublin in 1885.
O’Leary got him to be interested in Irish affairs.
Yeats’s first meeting with Maud Gonne in London in January 1889 because of
O’Leary.
The volumes of poems up to The Green Helmet (1910) are dominated by his love
for her. “No Second Troy”
He was most active in the setting up of an Irish National Theatre in 1908, which
started in 1899. He combines his interest in Irish nationalism and the mysterious
through mythology. “Man and the Echo”
From Responsibilities (1914) onwards, his poetry develops great dramatic power and
scope.
From “Easter 1916” through “Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen” and “Meditations in
Time of Civil War” (both in Tower, 1928)
In 1917 he married George Hyde Lees whom he met in 1911. A week after the
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wedding, she produced automatic writing, which became the basis of Yeats’s A
Vision. “The Second Coming,” “The Leda and the Swan.”
He met Pound, who introduced Yeats to the Japanese Noh plays. This led to the
production of At the Hawk’s Well in 1916. which is the first of his Four Plays for
Dancers. Yeats’s emphasis shifts from the actor to the language.
His middle period develops a theory of symbolism. To the symbols such as the
swan and the rose, Yeats added some new symbols like the tower, which was
Thoor Ballylee, near Gort, County Galway, not far from Coole Park. “Choice”
The theme of choosing between the perfection of life and that of art is central in
Yeats’s best, The Tower (1928) and The Winding Stair (1933). Byzantium poems.
One of the principal subjects of his Last Poems is the raging against old age.
Another development is that of the language of his masterly reverie poems: “Among
School Children,” “In Memory of Eva Gore-Booth and Con Markiewicz,” “Coole
Park, 1929.”
About Derek Walcott (1930- ):
Born and raised in the West Indies, Walcott has been publishing poetry and plays
for some four decades. Early on he apprenticed himself to English tradition - in
particular the Elizabethans and Jacobeans, Wordsworth, Tennyson, Yeats, Hardy,
and Robert Lowell.
This traditional diction is in harmony with the local influences, the dialect phrases
and constructions of the Caribbean. The diction is jazzed and quickened.
In the 1950s and 1960s, Walcott’s work was little heeded because of his traditional
tendency, but in the recent decade he has been receiving proper attention from the
reader.
It is generally agreed that Walcott’s breakthrough came with his Another Life (New
York and London, 1979), a long lyrical saga that dramatizes the artistic struggles
that led the poet to leave the Caribbean.
W. B. Yeats and Derek Walcott: New Poetry and Tradition
85
Walcott’s next collections, Seagrapes (New York and London, 1976), The Star-Apple
Kingdom (New York and London, 1979), and The Fortunate Traveller (New York,
1981; London, 1982) followed. Walcott takes firm control of his diction by fusing
the diction of his masters and his own. In Midsummer (New York and London,
1983), a sequence of fifty-four poems, form and craft become second-nature.
In 1990 he published Omeros that many think is his crowning achievement. This
can be read alongside, as well as against, the Homeric text.
Walcott’s Collected Poems (New York) was published in 1987. He teaches at Boston
University and spends part of every year on St Lucia. He was awarded the Nobel
Prize for Literature in 1992.
III
Walcott’s Collected Poems 1948-1984 begins with four poems selected
from In A Green Night and ends with six poems from Midsummer. I will
choose some from the book that I think are the guiding principles of his
poetry. I will try to put together what other critics have said about the
poems prior to presenting mine. Thus, I hope to arrive at some tentative
conclusion as to the nature of his poetry when put alongside and against
the English tradition.
The first poem I will concentrate on is “A Far Cry from Africa.” The
poem is neither long nor difficult; however, it is very significant for the
reader to heed it: Let me quote it in full:
A wind is ruffling the tawny pelt
Of Africa. Kikuyu, quick as flies,
Batten upon the bloodstreams of the veldt.
Corpses are scattered through a paradise.
Only the worm, colonel of carrion, cries:
”Waste no compassion on these separate dead!”
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Statistics justify and scholars seize
The salients of colonial policy.
What is that to the white child hacked in bed?
To savages, expendable as Jews?
Threshed out by beaters, the long rushes break
In a white dust of ibises whose cries
Have wheeled since civilization’s dawn
From the parched river or beast-teeming plain.
The violence of beast on beast is read
As natural law, but upright man
Seeks his divinity by inflicting pain.
Delirious as these worried beasts, his wars
Dance to the tightened carcass of a drum,
While he calls courage still that native dread
Of the white peace contracted by the dead.
Again brutish necessity wipes its hands
Upon the napkins of a dirty cause, again
A waste of our compassion, as with Spain,
The gorilla wrestles with the superman.
I who am poisoned with the blood of both,
Where shall I turn, divided to the vein?
I who have cursed
The drunken officer of British rule, how choose
Between this Africa and the English tongue I love?
Betray them both, or give back what they give?
How can I face such slaughter and be cool?
How can I turn from Africa and live?
(Walcott 17-8)
J. D. McClatchy’s “Divided Child” is one of the best critiques on
Walcott’s Collected Poems 1948-1984. As suggested by his title, Walcott’s
characteristics as poet lie in what he is. Walcott is “divided to the vein.”
The tough position the young Walcott had occupied is best put in the
beginning of McClatchy’s essay:
W. B. Yeats and Derek Walcott: New Poetry and Tradition
87
At the recent International PEN Congress in New York, as part of a
panel considering “Alienation and the State,” Derek Walcott spoke of
having been born on an island, St. Lucia, with no ruins, no museum,
no dates. “It was,” he said, “a country without a history.” The task
he set himself as a young poet was not to discover his history but to
create one, and to make it out of himself, out of his circumstances
and his birthright.
(Hamner, Critical Perspectives on Derek Walcott 356)
This is not untrue. Yet in fact Walcott is deeply rooted in tradition in
terms of the land and language. He has his African background behind
him, and the long tradition of English is always with him. If Walcott had
cast all of his background and based his work only on the Caribbean,
then he could remain a minor local poet. Instead, he had incorporated
into his work some greatest elements from Western literature, with an
unprecedented gift and flexibility. Probably since Shakespeare, no one has
borrowed as much as Walcott did, and as well as Walcott did, from other
literature. Shakespeare borrowed from the Continent, and Walcott borrows
from what Shakespeare planted in English literature, fusing what he
borrowed and what he is and has.
Walcott grew up with three languages - French, Creole, and English.
This has posed difficulty for him, but he could outgrow it to become a
major Third World poet. Even though I tend to disagree with McCatchy
when he says, “The real point is that all poetry is written in dialect,” his
word on Walcott’s style is precise and to the point. Here is what he says:
Our best poets have created their own [dialect]. Though we use the
term “style” because we more often read than listen to poems, dialect
would just as likely describe an Ashbery or a Plath poem whose
distinctive accents are unmistakable. Walcott too is a poet who wants
to be both read and listened to. His style could be called English
speech with a West Indian inflection; or, as he himself might describe
it, he thinks in one language and moves in another. Even his
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“standard” poems have a peculiar loping quality to their lines, a
slower rhythm than those of his peers. (Hamner 356)
Generally, what McClatchy says here is sound. However, in Walcott’s case,
how much he forms a new English is the point we should focus on. Even
a child is peculiar when he is under the influence of a dialect. Why
Walcott is great is how much he has established as a “traditional” poet
who has a whole range of local and “traditional” influences.
The frequently quoted and discussed poem, “A Far Cry from Africa” is
the first poem in his Collected Poems, selected from his In A Green Night
(1962). It is very meaningful that the poet had just hit the gold mine at a
very early stage of his life, which he would be digging and digging for
many years to come in the course of his poetic career.
I who am poisoned with the blood of both,
Where shall I turn, divided to the vein?
I who have cursed
The drunken officer of British rule, how choose
Between this Africa and the English tongue I love?
Betray them both, or give back what they give?
How can I face such slaughter and be cool?
How can I turn from Africa and live? (Walcott 18)
However difficult and painful it was for him to take both, he did
successfully choose both Africa and the English tongue he loves.
As McClatchy says, I think his literary power comes to surface with
the publication of Another Life in 1973. “Not until his book-length poem
Another Life in 1973, when he turned his manner into his subject matter,
did Walcott use literary history to tap a resounding strength in himself.”
(357) The poem, with more than 4,000 lines, is one of the best long
autobiographical poems in English. It is a story of the growth of a poetic
mind, a story of how “he fell in love with art,/ and life began.” Walcott as
a poet of vivid sensual power is revealed in his description of Anna:
W. B. Yeats and Derek Walcott: New Poetry and Tradition
89
For one late afternoon, when again she stood
in the door of a twilight always left ajar,
when dusk had softened the first bulb
the colour of the first weak star,
I asked her, “Choose,”
the amazed dusk held its breath,
the earth’s pulse staggered,
she nodded, and that nod
married earth with lightening.
And now we were the first guess of the earth
and everything stood still for us to name.
Against the blades of palms and yellow sand,
I hear that open laugh,
I see her stride
as ruthless as that flax-bright harvester
Judith, with Holofernes’ lantern in her hand. (230-231)
According to McClatchy, Robert Lowell is Walcott’s model in the
mature work of the past decade, meaning the three books, The Star-Apple
Kingdom (1979), The Fortunate Traveller (1981), and Midsummer (1984).
Under his influence, Walcott turned from the mythological to the historical
and from fictions to facts; his voice has gotten clipped and severe.
McClatchy cited “Old New England” as a direct influence. Though
McClatchy did not make any connection, I do find that what Walcott has
been travelling is no other than the poetic route Yeats had travelled.
Yeats’s early involvement with the Abbey Theatre movement, his mystical
and idealistic temperament growing more political and realistic as he
matured; his poetry becoming stark and epigrammatic in his middle and
last period.
McClatchy gives some of the titles that “will be sufficient to impress
any newcomers,” such as “The Sea is History,” “Egypt, Tobago,” “The
Star-Apple Kingdom,” and “North and South,” “Beachhead,” “Europa,” “The
Hotel Normandie Pool.” and all of Midsummer.
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IV
There is another critique on the poetry of Walcott, an excellent one by
Seamus Heaney, a Nobel Literature Prize winner, himself. Heaney begins
his essay, “The Language of Exile” (304) by saying how Yeats and Walcott
went beyond what they had mastered:
A poet appeases his original needs by learning to make works that
seem to be all his own work - Yeats at the stage of The Wind among
the Reeds. Then begins that bothersome and exhilarating second
need, to go beyond what he has mastered of himself, take on the
otherness of the world and take it into works that remain his own
yet offer rights-of-way to everybody else: the kind of understanding
and composure Yeats had won by the time he published The Wild
Swans at Coole. Or the kind of sumptuous authority which Derek
Walcott displays in The Star-Apple Kingdom. (Heaney 304)
As Heaney places Walcott alongside Yeats by referring to the book, The
Star-Apple Kingdom., let’s hear more about it. “The best poems in The
Star-Apple Kingdom. are dream visions; the high moments are
hallucinatory, cathartic, redemptive even.” (306) “Koenig of the River” is
the example:
Koenig knew now there was no one on the river.
Entering its brown mouth choking with lilies
and curtained with midges, Koenig poled the shallop
....
Around the bend the river poured its silver
like some remorseful mine, giving and giving
everything green and white: white sky, white
water, and the dull green like a drumbeat
of the slow-sliding forest, the green heat;
then, on some sandbar, a mirage ahead:
fabric of muslin sails, spiderweb rigging,
W. B. Yeats and Derek Walcott: New Poetry and Tradition
91
a schooner, foundered on black river mud,
was rising slowly up from the riverbed,
and a top-hatted native reading an inverted
newspaper.
“Where’s our Queen?” Koenig shouted.
“Where’s our Kaiser?”
The nigger disappeared.
Koenig felt that he himself was being read
like the newspaper or a hundred-year-old novel.
“The Queen dead! Kaiser dead!” the voices shouted.
And it flashed through him those trunks were not wood
but that the ghosts of slaughtered Indians stood
there in the mangroves, their eyes like fireflies
in the green dark, and that like hummingbirds
they sailed rather than ran between the trees.
The river carried him past his shouted words.
The schooner had gone down without a trace.
“There was a time when we ruled everything.”
Koening sang to his corrugated white reflection. (379-82)
I agree with Heaney when he says this:
Walcott possesses English more deeply and sonorously than most of
the English themselves. Except for Ted Hughes, I can think of
nobody now writing with such imperious linguistic gifts. And in spite
of the sheen off those lines, I suspect he is not so much interested
in the “finish” of his work as its drive. (Hamner 307)
Compared with Yeats, it seems certain that Walcott is less concerned with
the finish of a work than the luminosity, as well as the power, of poetry.
Yeats is a Matisse cum Picasso, whereas Walcott is a Cezanne or a
Vincent van Gogh as far as the use of poetic diction is concerned. Yeats
exerts power of poetry through perfection of poetic form itself, and Walcott
exerts power of poetry through strokes after strokes of words, luminous
and colorful, sometimes as much as Shakespeare and Hopkins.
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Maybe it is good and appropriate to compare the mature Yeats and
the mature Walcott, to see how much they are different from each other,
and how much they are traditional. To me, Yeats’s “Leda and the Swan”
and Walcott’s “Europa” compare well, both being considered the
masterpieces by many. Here is Yeats’s, which was written in 1923 and
which is from The Tower (1928):
A sudden blow: the great wings beating still
Above the staggering girl, her thighs caressed
By the dark webs, her nape caught in his bill,
He holds her helpless breast upon his breast.
How can those terrified vague fingers push
The feathered glory from her loosening thighs?
And how can body, laid in that white rush,
But feel the strange heart beating where it lies?
A shudder in the loins engenders there
The broken wall, the burning roof and tower
And Agamemnon dead.
Being so caught up,
So mastered by the brute blood of the air,
Did she put on his knowledge with his power
Before the indifferent beak could let her drop? (441)
I count this poem among the finest few by English masters (including
Shakespeare’s “The Phoenix and Turtle”). The poem begins in the middle
of an act, a moment of the new beginning in history. It embraces both
personal and historical connotations: on the one hand, the struggles
between Yeats and Maud Gonne seem embedded deeply in the poem or
the relation between Ireland and England could be read whether the poet
intended to do so or not; on the other, it is a mythological poem, in
which the poet asks a question that is still relevant to the political
W. B. Yeats and Derek Walcott: New Poetry and Tradition
93
situations in Ireland that Yeats had been going through. In fact Yeats
wrote this poem “because the editor [George Russell] of a political review
[The Irishman Statesman] asked me for a poem.” Yeats thought that
“nothing is now possible but some movement, or birth from above,
preceded by some violent annunciation.” (Jeffares 247) The poem as it is
is of highest intensity and tight form. Each word and phrasing, as it is,
supports the whole structure; with any slightest change of it, the poem
will change. But look at the earlier poem that had been undergoing many
changes of words and phrasings; however, the final poem no longer allows
any change; even Yeats could neither add nor subtract any from it. This
is how Yeats wrote a poem, heeding the finish of a poem as a work of
art.
Let me now go to Walcott. His “Europa” is a good comparison to
Yeats’s “Leda and the Swan.” It is not clear whether Walcott had been
under the influence of Yeats when he wrote this poem. But as reader I
feel it has Yeatsian echoes here and there. Europa and Leda are the
mythological women, whose beauty inspires the love of Zeus. Yeats and
Walcott each created two different poems of stark beauty. Here is
Walcott’s:
The full moon is so fierce that I can count the
coconuts’ cross-hatched shade on bungalows,
their white walls raging with insomnia.
The stars leak drop by drop on the tin plates
of the sea almonds, and the jeering clouds
are luminously rumpled as the sheets.
The surf, insatiably promiscuous,
groans through the walls; I feel my mind
whiten to moonlight, altering that foam
which daylight unambiguously designed,
from a tree to a girl’s body bent in foam;
then, treading close, the black hump of a hill,
its nostrils softly snorting, nearing the
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naked girl splashing her breasts with silver.
Both would have kept their proper distance still,
if the chaste moon hadn’t swiftly drawn the drapes
of a dark cloud, coupling their shapes.
She teases with those flashes, yes, but once
you yield to human horniness, you see
through all that moonshine what they really were,
those gods as seed-bulls, gods as rutting swansas overheated farmhand’s literature.
Who ever saw her pale arms hook his horns,
her thighs clamped tight in their deep-plunging ride,
watched, in the hiss of the exhausted foam,
her white flesh constellate to phosphorus
as in salt darkness beast and woman come?
Nothing is there, just as it always was,
but the foam’s wedge to the horizon-light,
then, wire-thin, the studded armature,
like drops still quivering on his matted hide,
the hooves and horn-points anagrammed in stars. (418-9)
Both poems deal with a mythological theme. Both deal with a love-making
scene. However, the two poems are totally different in the manner of
language developing. Yeats here is almost a classical painter who is in
control of every detail and every hue, not to mention the whole structure,
of the poem. In the meantime, Walcott is an Impressionist painter, laying
bricks after bricks of colors -words- on the contour of the poem’s
impression. Walcott’s “Europa” is more colorful and earthy. Yeats’s “Leda
and the Swan” is more direct and passionate; yet more dignified and so
distant. Walcott begins by describing nature outside man and ends by
returning to nature: the moon and bungalow and the stars; Yeats begins
in the middle and ends there, with the smell of the passionate act still
hanging in the air. Yeats depend on the mythology to depict the breaking
of the virginity; of the similar moment, Walcott’s depiction is more direct
W. B. Yeats and Derek Walcott: New Poetry and Tradition
95
and graphic but the reader’s imagination has room to be engaged and
active in by leaving it to the reader:
Who ever saw her pale arms hook his horns,
her thighs clamped tight in their deep-plunging ride,
watched, in the hiss of the exhausted foam,
her white flesh constellate to phosphorus
as in salt darkness beast and woman come?
Of course, the answer to the question is “None.” But paradoxically, all of
us do see and watch “beast and woman come” in salt darkness. Do we
not? This is the power of Walcott’s. He is in the age of science, just as we
all are. He begins and ends with nature. Yet his poetry depends on
mythology and tradition, as his mentors including Yeats did.
I want to compare both poets by discussing “Winding Up” and “The
Lake Isle of Innisfree.”
Yeats’s “The Lake Isle”:
I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made:
Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee,
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.
And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes
dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the
cricket sings;
There midnight’s all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet’s wings.
I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavement grey,
I hear it in the deep heart’s core. (Yeats 117)
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And Walcott’s “Winding Up”:
I live on the water,
alone. Without wife and children.
I have circled every possibility
to come to this:
a low home by grey water,
with windows always open
to the stale sea. We do not choose such things,
but we are what we have made.
We suffer, the years pass,
we shed freight but not our need
for encumbrances. Love is a stone
that settled on the seabed
under grey water. Now, I require nothing
from poetry but true feeling,
no pity, no fame, no healing. Silent wife,
we can sit watching grey water,
and in a life awash
with mediocrity and trash
live rock-like.
I shall unlearn feeling,
unlearn my gift. That is greater
and harder than what passes there for life. (Walcott 336)
The poem, “Winding Up” by Walcott is to me very similar in tone to
Yeats’s “The Lake Isle.” However, the attitude shown by Walcott is like
that of Yeats’s “A Coat” or “The Wild Swans at Coole.” Walcott in this
poem accepts what he is, and what he wants now is true feeling for
poetry and live rock-like with a silent wife beside him. For this, he wants
W. B. Yeats and Derek Walcott: New Poetry and Tradition
97
to unlearn feeling, unlearn his gift. Yeats’s desire to go to the Lake Isle is
more strongly expressed; however, although his desire is strong, Yeats in
this poem is unable to fulfill his dream to “arise and go to Innisfree,” for
physically, he is bound to be in London, on the pavement grey. “Winding
Up” seems more familiar to us who are in the last phase of the twentieth
century. Yeats sounds sincere and moving to us, as he is that much
distant: part of us that desire something extremely idealistic and part of
us being always thirsty for something that could no longer be satisfied. He
just hears it [the lake water] in the deep heart’s core.
“Winding Up” is from Walcott’s Sea Grapes (1976), the first collection
after Another Life (1973). “The Lake Isle” is from The Rose (1893), an early
book of poetry. Yeats’s greatness as poet is his malleability; as he grew
mature, his poetry transformed itself. If not as great as before, it got
greater and finer.
And the next poems I want to discuss are “Moon” and “Long-Legged
Fly.”
First, Walcott’s “Moon”:
Resisting poetry I am becoming a poem.
O lolling Orphic head silently howling,
my own head rises from its surf of cloud.
Slowly my body grows a single sound,
slowly I become
a bell,
an oval, disembodied vowel,
I grow, an owl,
an aureole, white fire.
I watch the moonstruck image of the moon burn,
a candle mesmerised by its own aura,
and turn
my hot, congealing face, towards that forked mountain
which wedges the drowned singer.
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That frozen glare,
that morsured, classic petrifaction.
Haven’t you sworn off such poems for this year,
and no more on the moon?
Why are you gripped by demons of inaction?
Whose silence shrieks so soon?
Then, let’s look at Yeats’s “Long-legged Fly.”
That civilization may not sink,
Its great battle lost,
Quiet the dog, tether the pony
To a distant post;
Our master Caesar is in the tent
Where the maps are spread,
His eyes fixed upon nothing,
A hand under his head.
Like a long-legged fly upon the stream
His mind moves upon silence.
That the topless towers be burnt
And men recall that face,
Move most gently if move you must
In this lonely place.
She thinks, part woman, three parts a child,
That nobody looks; her feet
Practice a tinker shuffle
Picked up on a street.
Like a long-legged fly upon the stream
His mind moves upon silence.
That girls at puberty may find
The first Adam in their thought,
Shut the door of the Pope’s chapel,
Keep those children out.
W. B. Yeats and Derek Walcott: New Poetry and Tradition
99
There on that scaffolding reclines
Michael Angelo.
With no more sound than the mice make
Like a long-legged fly upon the stream
His mind moves upon silence. (617-8)
Both of these poems show the poet in creative process. Yeats’s mind
moves like a long-legged fly upon the stream, just as the mind of a great
human being, such as Caesar, Helen, and Michaelangelo, is deeply
engaged in something great. It is the very moment of moments that
Yeats’s art focuses on in his great poems. As compared with him, Walcott
seems more interested in the moments building up a great moment. Both
poems concentrate on a surrealistic movement of mind; however, Yeats is
in tight control of himself whereas Walcott is undergoing a transforming of
self. Walcott’s enters into the realm of being in a strange world, a
borderline of this world and the next. This poem sounds like something in
Yeats’s “The Cap and Bells.” Walcott sings here with a feeling body,
whereas Yeats sings with a meditating heart. Yeats had to wait to sing
with his whole body and mind until the last poems, no matter how hard
he had tried to do so. But then why is he so touching? It is probably
because he is an artist, who pours out his heart, a very sincere gesture,
in a perfect form, which we modern writers lack. Both are the poems of
extreme beauty, with two differing poetic sensibilities, each working in a
finest mode.
V
It is too early to make a concluding remark about Derek Walcott when
he is still very active writing poems and plays and when I have not
investigated his crowing achievement, Omeros, here. But it seems too
obvious to view this work from the perspective of tradition. And judging
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from what we have already gone through above, along with the poems by
both Walcott and Yeats, we could assume their greatness as poets.
However, they sound very different even though both are deep-rooted in
English literature. They originated from the same origin, English literature,
diverging as they grew mature; Yeats emerging as the representative High
Modernist and Walcott becoming one of the most important poets, with
Robert Lowell, Seamus Heaney, and Ted Hughes, in the last decades or
so. Although there are some young poets of great talent in literature in
English, it is certain that Walcott will occupy a central place in it, as a
poet who has inherited a great tradition and given a new life to it - as to
the local influences exerted by Walcott I will make another attempt in a
separate paper. In giving a new life to it, Walcott is greater than Yeats.
Finally, on the basis of the achievements by these two great poets, we
could assume that tradition in literature is the very nutrient, with which a
new poetry will sprout.
Works Cited
Walcott, Derek. Collected Poems 1948-1984. London and Boston: Faber
and Baber, 1986. McClatchy, J. D. “Divided Child,” Critical
Perspectives on Derek Walcott. Compiled and Edited by Robert D.
Hamner. Washington, D. C.: Three Continent Press, 1993.
Hamilton, Ian. ed. Oxford Companion to 20th-Century Poetry. Oxford:
Oxford UP, 1996.
Heaney, Seamus. “The Language of Exile,” Critical Perspectives on Derek
Walcott. Compiled and Edited by Robert D. Hamner. Washington,
D. C.: Three Continent Press, 1993.
W. B. Yeats and Derek Walcott: New Poetry and Tradition
101
Jeffares, A. Norman. A New Commentary on the Poems of W.B. Yeats.
London: The Mamillan Press Ltd., 1984.
Yeats, W.B. ed. Peter Allt and Russel K. Aspach. The Variorum Edition of
The Poems of W. B. Yeats. New York: Macmillan Publishing Co.,
Inc., 1957.
102
Young Suck Rhee
전통과 새로운 시학의 모색: 예이츠와 데릭 왈코트의 경우
우리말 요약)
(
이영석
이 논문은 Yeats와 Derek Walcott의 시들을 전통적 관점에서 바라보고자 한
다. 여기서 전통이라고 하는 것은 다름 아닌 영문학을 뜻한다. 엄밀한 의미에서 이
두 시인은 “외국어”인 영어로 시를 썼고, 그들의 시가 영국과 미국의 시와는 다르
게 쓰여질 수밖에 없다. 이들은 영문학의 전통을 깊이까지 들어가 이해하고 자신들
의 시에 가장 잘 활용한 시인들이라 할 수 있다. Yeats는 신화적 요소와 전통적인
정형적 형식미에서 시의 완성을 추구했고, Walcott은 자신의 배경과 환경을 가장
전통적인 영문학을 통해서 시적 표현 수단으로 변용 시키는 데에 성공한 시인이다.
이들 두 시인들의 대표적 시 몇 편을 검토함으로써 전통은 새로운 시학의 개척에
부담은 될 수 있어도, 방해는 될 수 없음이 확인되었다.
이들의 예는 21세기의 시의 진행 방향을 예시하는 것으로 받아들여도 좋을 것
이다.