Derek Walcott

1. Derek Walcott Derek Walcott Brandon Small P.5 English 9 5/20/09

2. Table of contents 1. Love After Love (pg.6) 2. A Far Cry From Africa(pg.7) 3. The Schooner 'Flight‘(pg.8) 4. A City's Death By Fire(pg.9) 5. The Sea Is History(pg.10) Biography (pg.2) Glossary (pg.3) Interpretation and opinion (pg.4) Introduction of poems (pg.5) Afterward(pg.11)

3. Biography • Derek Walcott was born in 1930 in the town of Castries in Saint Lucia, one of the Windward Islands in the Lesser Antilles. The experience of growing up on the isolated volcanic island, an ex-British colony, has had a strong influence on Walcott's life and work. Both his grandmothers were said to have been the descendants of slaves. His father, a Bohemian water person, died when Derek and his twin brother, Roderick, were only a few years old. His mother ran the town's Methodist school. After studying at St. Mary's College in his native island and at the University of the West Indies in Jamaica, Walcott moved in 1953 to Trinidad, where he has worked as theatre and art critic. At the age of 18, he made his debut with 25 Poems, but his breakthrough came with the collection of poems, In a Green Night 1962. In 1959, he founded the Trinidad Theatre Workshop which produced many of his early plays.

4. Glossary • Acceptable- able to be endured; tolerable • Accidentally- Occurring unexpectedly, unintentionally, or by chance. • Accommodate- be agreeable or acceptable to; • Amateur- A person who engages in an art, science, study, or athletic activity as a pastime rather than as a profession. • Bellwether- One that serves as a leader or as a leading indicator of future trends • Conscientious- Guided by or in accordance with the dictates of conscience; • Drunkenness- Delirious with or as if with strong drink; intoxicated. • Guarantee- Something that assures a particular outcome or condition • Hierarchy- A body of persons having authority. • Maintenance- The act of maintaining or the state of being maintained.

5. Introduce of poem’s • Love After Love-The time will come when, with elation you will greet yourself arriving at your own door, in your own mirror and each will smile at the other's welcome, and say, sit here. Eat. You will love again the stranger who was your self. Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart to itself, to the stranger who has loved you all your life, whom you ignored for another, who knows you by heart. Take down the love letters from the bookshelf, the photographs, the desperate notes, peel your own image from the mirror. Sit. Feast on your life. • A Far Cry From Africa- 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!" Statistics justify and scholars seize The salients of colonial policy. • The Schooner 'Flight-In idle August, while the sea soft, and leaves of brown islands stick to the rim of this Carribean, I blow out the light by the dreamless face of Maria Concepcion to ship as a seaman on the schooner Flight. Out in the yard turning gray in the dawn, I stood like a stone and nothing else move but the cold sea rippling like galvanize and the nail holes of stars in the sky roof, • A City's Death By Fire-After that hot gospeller has levelled all but the churched sky, I wrote the tale by tallow of a city's death by fire; Under a candle's eye, that smoked in tears, I Wanted to tell, in more than wax, of faiths that were snapped like wire. All day I walked abroad among the rubbled tales, Shocked at each wall that stood on the street like a liar; • The Sea Is History- is about the sea s

6. Afterward • A far cry far Africa summary: Is a painful and jarring depiction of ethnic conflict and divided loyalties. The opening images of the poem are drawn from accounts of the Mau Mau Uprising, an extended and bloody battle during the 1950s between European settlers and the native Kikuyu tribe in what is now the republic of Kenya. In the early twentieth century, the first white settlers arrived in the region, forcing the Kikuyu people off of their tribal lands. • A city’s death by fire summary: • The Schooner “Flight” summary: The Schooner "Flight"’ was written partly as a tribute to Piers Plowman, a work produced at a point in English history when written literature was moving into the ascendancy but still depended largely on its oral traditions. Walcott’s poem combines elements of Trinidadian calypso and English ballad form, which are both based in oral cultures. • Love after love Summary: • The sea is History summary: The sea as as a metaphor for the histories that are eclipsed or hidden by "official history"--whose patriarchal and racist agendas are unmasked by Rich's and Walcot's poems, respectively. The two poems share other parallels: both take us to the ocean floor and thus have us revisit the history inscribed there. Walcot's poem is much more ironic: he parallels the the slave trade and gruesome sufferings of the Middle Passage and beyond to Hebrew and Christian cultural sign posts.