The Design of Derek Walcott’s Omeros

For its thematic range Omeros takes the twin Americas and the mirroring continents of the “Old World.” In a vast sweep through history, space and time it musters memories of the empires of Britain, Venice, and Rome, their fatal emblem Troy, and the almost obliterated early denizens of the “New World.”  The prime focus falls on the middle seas, Mediterranean and Caribbean, which the minds of arriving Europeans identified through bold metaphors that get refashioned here.  Metaphors and narrative traditions have shaped the struggle to grasp the geography outlined by the heavy brow of older islands running across from Cuba and Jamaica to Hispaniola and Puerto Rico, and by the descending archipelago of volcanic upstarts between the vast ocean and the encircled sea. These are the lesser Antilles, down from the so-called Leeward islands; Antigua, St Kitt’s, and Monserrat, with tiny Dutch Sint Eustatius--to the so-called Windwards: Guadaloupe, Dominica, and Martinique, or up from Trinidad, Grenada, St Vincent’s, in from Barbados, to St Lucia, which was singled out by two powerful Mediterranean metaphors, ”Gibralter of the Caribbean” and “Helen of the West Indies.”

I. The Tissue of Plots & Themes

Omeros zeroes in on St Lucia’s northwest coast where, between the pounding Atlantic and the lapping sea, rise the two low humps of what colonists called the gros îlet (big little island). Although now itself joined by a causeway and renamed Pigeon Point, its former label has passed to the nearby village, commonly anglicized as Gros Islet. The older form with its circumflex persists in Omeros as one sign of the mixed and layered language that invites its own close reading. The village sprawls along a reef-guarded bay. Glossy sea almond trees shade the beach, where nets dry on racks, conch shells lie in heaps, and boats with peeling paint bear mottoes like “In God We Troust,” which appears in the poem.
 

The plot that unfolds in Gros Islet features descendants of slaves. The main characters are Achille and Hector and they compete for the same woman: “The duel of these fishermen | was over a shadow and its name was Helen” (17.6).  Such names abound in St Lucia’s telephone bookÿ|Ätestimony to the colonial practice of naming slaves from mythology or religion.  In the poem the names open a dialogue with prior epic that intensifies at the first sight of Helen ogled by tourists, among them the Narrator: (23.19-24.6)
 

That was when I turned with him towards the village,
and saw, through the caging wires of the noon sky,
a beach with its padding panther; now the mirage
 

dissolved into a woman with a madras head-tie
but the head proud, although it was looking for work.
I felt like standing in homage to a beauty
 

that left, like a ship, widening eyes in its wake.
“Who the hell is that?” a tourist near my table
asked a waitress. The waitress said, “She? She too proud!”
 

As the carved lids of the unimaginable
ebony mask unwrapped from its cotton-wool cloud,
the waitress sneered, “Helen.” And all the rest followed. (1.IV.iii)
 

The allure is familiar, but the St Lucian madras and look of an African mask are new. They first caught my eye when I was checking to see if Omeros would be worth teaching. It was love at first sight. I must have intuited that any poet who could do this with the most famous of mythic paradigms would repay reading. Instinctively I began to read as I would any other telling innovation in epic.  “And all the rest followed.” The phrase evokes not only my experience but, I suspect, the poet’s: once he gets this telling version of the key figure in epic tradition, the notorious “face that launched a thousand ships,” the rest will come.  Helen in fact links three main plots.
 

As the village plot proceeds, Achille imagines buying Helen’s love by diving for mythic treasure beneath the sea. When that fails and Helen leaves him for Hector, Achille on the rebound makes a hallucinatory quest journeying back in time and across the Atlantic in search of his African ancestor and original name.
Achille’s quest is represented by means of a cinematic flashback, which reveals a West African village, the sudden violence of the raid that enslaved Achille’s ancestor, and the new slaves’ loss of their old identities in the forced travel of the Middle Passage.
Likewise vying for Helen, Hector quits the sea to drive a mini-van taxi, which St Lucians call transports. Hector’s attempt to change identity ends in a fatal crash, leaving Helen to rejoin Achille in her own sweet time although she rejects his ancestral African name for her expected child.
 

A second plot set in the village features another fisherman with a name drawn from Greek mythology, Philoctete. Like his namesake, Philo suffers from a stinking wound, which in the poem acquires historical significance as a symbol of slavery’s pain. Philo hangs out at a rumshop endowed with the emblematic name No Pain Café and kept by Ma Kilman, embodying the tradition of the obeah woman as seer and healer, who ministers to his sore.
At the climax of this plot, Ma Kilman also undertakes a quest. She leaves church and climbs to the forest where ants help her to rediscover her mothers’ herbal heritageÿ|Äa magical root to heal Philo. He emerges as a new Adam in Eden cleansed of slavery’s historical pain.
 

Also imagined hanging out at the No Pain Café is a blind old salt nicknamed Seven Seas, soon hailed as Omeros--the name for Homer in modern Greek. This figure confirms and focuses the other hints of dialogue with epic tradition: from Omeros, says the Narrator, he drew inspiration in boyhood (12.9): “Only in you, across centuries | of the sea’s parchment atlas, can I catch the noise | of the surf lines” (13.4-6).
 

Tracing his origins to Homer, the Narrator opens a plot of his own, although he later warns us to remember that “every ‘I’ is a || fiction finally” (28.3-4). The compound of autobiography with poetics develops into a quest for love and identity, both personal and poetic: what kind of epic is this going to be?
The Narrator’s plot begins in a Boston studio where he makes love to a Greek girl. Her longing to return to her islands (14.19-21) triggers his for St Lucia and evokes the village. Even while making love, he thinks back to the suffering of enslavement, which Philo’s wound symbolized (15.4-7). After this that, returning as a tourist, the Narrator spots Helen (23.1-24.6).
The Narrator’s plot regroups, takes stock and foreshadows further developments in a scene that closes Book One. He imagines visiting St Lucia’s capital Castries where his childhood home has been transformed into a frenetic printery spewing words. In this setting he projects a visitation by his Father’s Ghost, who declares that he left his son the “Will” of Shakespeare (68.21), the pun ascribing a powerful literary legacy to the poem. Another programmatic pun then directs the feet of the poem to emulate the rhythmic feet of the black women who once carried coal up ladders to refuel steamships in Castries harbor.
The Narrator returns and claims another kind of authority at the close of Book Three, where he meets, now, his frail Mother. From her he receives a benediction linking father and son, both identified in her mind as “Nature’s gentleman” (166.24). Issuing from the light of her nursing home into the shadowy street, the Narrator portrays himself as feeling at home with black identity. He thus associates himself with the main thrust of Book Three, which was Achille’s quest for African roots.
As Book Three ends the Narrator, still the Tourist, flies northward in a “minnow plane” watched by Achille from his canoe returning to Gros Islet (168.10-18). The scene wraps up not only Book Three but the whole first half of the poem, with its St Lucian focus, while setting the stage for the themes of displacement in the North that will occupy the fourth and fifth books. Looking both forward and back, the scene signals change, effecting a modulation, as in music, from major to minor keys.

Book Four opens with motifs of seasonal change and personal estrangement. Summer’s carnival is past, fall is verging towards winter. The Narrator represents himself as feeling out of place in New England, alone on a beach and bereft of love. He then closes Book Four on another lonely beach, where his grief attracts a second apparition by his Father’s Ghost, rather like the mother of Achilles consoling her son on the beach at Troy in book 18 of the Iliad. Again the Father conveys poetic directives: eventual return to St Lucia, but first the son must confront the pride of European cities the provincial parent never faced.

The resulting tour finds the Narrator in Book Five crossing between the New World and the Old.  With acutely self-reflexive irony, he represents Omeros as a blind drifter in London, unable to peddle a dog-eared Odyssey. The ragged vagabond gets expelled from the monumental center--Trafalgar Square and the Church of St Martin’s in the Fields--back to the scruffy wharves that teem with the human jetsam of empire.
The next scene finds the Narrator more at ease in an Ireland long victimized by empire. When he hails James Joyce as “our age’s Omeros, undimmed Master” (200.617,  he openly acknowledges a dialogue that has run throughout the poem. His choice of words also reflects another on-going dialogue, for he echoes another poet’s salute to his master: Dante’s greeting to Virgilio, “Tu se’ lo mio maestro e’l mio autore” (you are my master and my author, Inf. I.85). The tales of displacement in the North close in motifs of wintery discontent: Book Five ends with the Narrator’s attempt to navigate Boston’s ice in a futile quest for lost love.
Back home at last in Book Six, the Narrator finds a “green January” (223.2). He links his personal plot with the cure of Philoctete and imagines “the wrong love leaving me” (249.1) In Book Seven he hallucinates a climactic journey down St Lucia’s west coast. He makes the real volcano at Soufrière into his metaphoric equivalent of the underworlds in Dante and Vergil. His guide for this climactic transport is the blind Omeros, who redeems the poem from aesthetic damnation. With a final crossing of plots, the Narrator imagines his own coffin as a canoe stayed by the hand of the Caribbean, which he personfies as a steady and strong character like Achille (320.16-321.3).

I had sketched the plots of the fishermen and the Narrator only to realize how much remained and that it shared a third thematic ground: neither village nor city, but farm.
Early in Book One, Walcott introduces a pig farm that seems to be located some miles south of Gros Islet near Castries. He mentions views of white liners in the harbor (122.10) and “orange villas and military barracks” (223.2-3), which suggest the old colonial structures that dot the surrounding heights, their arched platforms making a very distant echo of the public architecture of the Roman empire.
In the farmer’s role, Walcott gives us Sergeant Major Dennis Plunkett, Retired: a lower class Englishman wounded while fighting Rommel in North Africa and never since quite right in the head. Walcott provides the Major with an Irish wife, Maud, represented as torn between two green places. She suffers incurable nostalgia for her roots in northern Ireland by the two lakes of Glen-da-lough, yet she also gardens on St Lucia, growing orchids; and she busies herself stitching the birds of the Antilles into a marvelous quilt. As the coverlet grows, it comes to suggest a shroud. All told, says the Narrator, it was “a fine marriage. Only a son was missing.” (29.3)
The plot-lines of farm and village intertwine through Helen, represented as formerly employed by the Plunketts. In domestic service she proved arrogant, ambiguously thievish, and certainly seductive. A sudden passion for Helen drove the Major to desire to give her a history. Her story becomes in the Major’s war-damaged mind a history of the island of St Lucia through its metaphorical identity as the “Helen of the West Indies.”
By crossing the two Helens in metaphor Walcott manages to incorporate into his work a sketch of colonial warfare between the British and French. He devotes a good part of Book Two to the Battle of the Saints (1782), in which the British admiral Rodney sailed from St Lucia to defeat the French Comte de Grasse. It had been de Grasse who just a year earlier off Yorktown kept a British fleet at bay, forcing Cornwallis to surrender to Washington and assuring success to the American revolution.
Walcott also cooks up a British midshipman named Plunkett, killed in the Battle of the Saints, whom the Major adopts in his mind to take the place of the son never born to Maud. Looking back on the Plunketts after his return home in Book Six, the Narrator links them to his personal plot, likening them to his own parents and himself to a missing son (“a changing shadow of Telemachus | in me” 263.22).  Also in Book Six in another crossing of plots, Ma Kilman’s powers heal the Major’s pain from the war and loss of Maud.
 

Once I had noticed how the farm served as a thematic ground in Books One and Two, it dawned on me that another farm plays a comparable part in Books Four and Five, where it is cross-linked to the Narrator’s discomfiture in the north. A Great Plains farm becomes the setting for a neglected figure from history, Catherine Weldon,  whom Walcott takes over and remakes for his own designs. He portrays her as a widow sympathizing with the plight of the native peoples and bereft of her son (like the Plunketts as opposed to the enigmatic fecundity of Helen).
Metaphorically Walcott identifies the native peoples with the New England autumn. The colored leaves attract tourists and drop off, to be burned in suburban bonfires, just as the natives were displaced by encroaching white civilization: a new and ironic twist to the nostalgic image of Indian summer.
After the bitter metaphors of autumn comes a flashback to the Indians’ winter, with U. S. cavalrymen slashing women and children, leaving bodies stiff in the snow at Wounded Knee. All this the Narrator crosses with the plot of his own wound in love, using the themes of their greater loss to place his own in perspective, before his final return to “green January” and the closing fantasy of his redemption and death.

II. Intermezzo: Theoretical Issues in Genre Change

Anyone eager to move from the big picture directly to closer reading may skip directly to part three. The poem, however, clearly makes an issue of tradition. We have seen it lay pointed claim to authoritiesÿ|Äa rather disparate lot at that: not merely Homer, which puts epic on the agenda, and the literary Shakespeare and Joyce, but also the African ancestor and the coaling women of Castries. The motif of their feet moving in “ancestral rhyme” suggests not only the rhyming verse derived from Dante but Africa and folk tradition in St Lucia. Yet the prominence early and late of the blind old bard Omeros makes epic the main issue.  Walcott himself has confirmed this in a back-handed way: “I do not think of it as an epic... Certainly not in the sense of epic design. Where are the battles? There are a few, I suppose. But ‘epic’ makes people think of great wars and great warriors.”  Literary disavowals, however, always underscore theoretical and practical concerns,  in this case the importance of relations with epic. Indeed “epic design” is precisely what emerges from the tissue of plots and themes, the grand musical structure, just sketched. Study and teaching have corroborated my intuition that Omeros renews epic tradition in traditional and compelling ways.
 

Such renewals can be described differently from the viewpoints of different observers. Analogies suggest themselves, for example, with so-called “tertiary epic,” which has been defined as using “the vehicle of the war novel to deny the validity of the heroic and of history altogether.”  In Omeros, the “great wars and great warriors” of epic stereotype make their entrance obliquely. They are represented from the viewpoint of a minor player who suffered a common soldier’s fate in North Africa, who muddles over ~the decline of empires, and bases history on a pun. The U. S. Cavalry gets represented from the viewpoint of the victims, as seen by a woman friend of Sitting Bull. The inversions might be characterized with Walcott’s own irony: “Every new mythology has screwed up the one preceding.”  But without forceful reprise, even misprision, authorities become dead letters. Reprise provokes and invigorates reading.
 

It is no small measure of Walcott’s achievement that he has already inspired considerable adjustments in critical thinking about epic.  Omeros with its minor voicings and oblique slants makes us scramble to scout our favorite texts for alternative voices.  In Homer’s Iliad after all don’t Achilles and Thersites sound off against their society’s dominant values? Of course the alternative viewpoint when expressed by the commoner Thersites gets brutally silenced by the master speaker Odysseus. But no one is able to keep the princely Achilles from his manic rage, which inflicts terrible pain on friends and enemies alike before it yields to awareness of humanity in shared pain (Book 24). Meanwhile in simile, metaphor, and the mirror of Achilles’ shield (Book 18), Homer achieves perspective and context by references to a background that includes country, farmers and herders. In the Odyssey, then, that background occasionally becomes foreground: Odysseus finds shelter and support from a swineherd of noble origin, but betrayal from a goatherd. Homer even reflects on the elements of his civilization by projecting its lack onto a version of country life. He represents the cyclops Polyphemus as a shepherd, monstrous and cannibalistic, endowed with one sole eye and deprived of the laws, religion, politics, shelter, agriculture, and navigation by which Homer’s society defined itself. Homer could also represent a farm as a refuge from city misrule for Laertes, the aged father of Odysseus.
 

Alternative voices, above all herders and lovers, took over the foreground in Theocritus. He altered the scene so drastically that readers have often failed to recognize in him a new version of epic. Theocritus brought to center-stage the herders that had been marginal or subaltern; he transformed the Cyclops from cannibal loner into feckless singer and lover. His innovations were “a process of deformation of the established canon,”  writes Kathryn Gutzwiller, invoking formalist theory to argue that Theocritus changed epic in ways theorized by Tynanov:  the “dominant” in a work, genre or epoch “rules, determines, and transforms the other elements” and the dominant of one phase gets reduced to secondary or marginal status in the subsequent phase.
Gutzwiller described Theocritean innovation in terms that invite comparisons with Walcott: the idylls of Theocritus “should be viewed as a transformation of epic, a shortened ver~sion of the grand form with accompanying deformations in subject matter (elevation of common characters and deflation of heroic ones) and in style (the use of serious language with comic or parodic intent). The deformation of epic is further accomplished by the ad~mix~ture of extra literary forms (herdsmen’s songs, incantations, cult songs, workers’ song) and literary forms of low status or nonpoetic character (mime, epistle, prose en~co~mi~um).”
 

Like Theocritus, Walcott follows in the wake of a prestigious text. His three-line stanzas and frequent rhyme-sets adapt without reproducing the tercets of Dante (aba bcb cdc etc.).  Also like Dante, Walcott enters his own work in a personal plot that moves from exile to paradise.  At the same time, Omeros absorbs extra-literary forms such as calypso, chanty, epigram (175.6), idyll (321.4) catechism,  reggae (161.6), and cinematic flashbacks, fades, and cuts. Omeros also parodies political language with serio-comic effect (2.XX-XXI.i: 104.4-118.27). Its mixed linguistic codes, with touches of creole and patois, bear comparison with the counterfeit of country speech that Theocritus concocted after the artificial high style of Homer.  On a classical scale, Walcott’s Major certainly amounts to a minor. Plunkett farming pigs on an island far from his place of birth more nearly resembles the Odyssean swineherd than the returning master and lord. Walcott’s village plot, too, moves down scale. Achille was this fisherman who loved Helen, see. But she got knocked up by Hector, who drove like crazy and cracked up his bus. Seen in this way, the story resembles nothing so much as the narrative pastiche in Petronius’s Satyricon when the ex-slave Trimalchio tries to demonstrate high culture only to incite ridicule from the Narrator and the reader. Above all, the keystone in Walcott’s design is the lowest form of wit--paronomasia--as a metaphoric tool.
 

 Theocritean down-shifting, however, and Petronian parody offer at best only partial and imperfect analogies. Omeros dignifies the descendents of slaves and represents them as sympathetic, moral paradigms.  Then there are the sheer length, multiple plots, complex themes, the historical and expansive scope--aftermath of colonialism and slavery, detritus of empire,  all of which presuppose that further cultural dominants reinflated epic tradition.
 

Epic did in fact reinflate right under Gutzwiller’s eyes, yet she seems not to have considered that cultural dominants can stimulate expansive as well as reductive work. When she looked at the major ancient sequel to Theocritus, she saw only a pale replica of his reductive form. She did not notice the reinflative impact of a new cultural dominant. Taking the reduced epic of Theocritus, Vergil began to reflate it in his Bucolics right from the start.  His first eclogue featured the new dominant of Rome;  and he proceeded to import elements of drama and higher epic modes,  along with extra-literary language, notably oracles, proverbs, and the oratory of praise.
 

Experimenting in the bucolic laboratory, in miniature as it were, he made epic the vehicle of Roman history and proto-Augustan myth. This interaction with history, in turn, made him a new and defining authority in the tradition Walcott inherits and renews.  The Bucolics reversed Theocritus and prepared for the progressively ampler horizons of the Georgics and the Aeneid.  Not incidentally for Walcott, it was Vergil who crossed epic form with imperial fate.
The pivotal role of the Bucolics has been neglected if not forgotten by recent historians of change in epic,  yet it gives us a more complete background for Omeros. As in the Bucolics, so here characters of low degree become vehicles of elevated themes and historical import. Vergil rose on the surge of renewed empire. The ebb of Rome and her erstwhile coloniesÿ|Äfirst victims, then emulators, such as Spain, France, Portugal, the Netherlands, and Britainÿ|Äleft the traces that Walcott appropriates and recombines.  Walcott replaces the imperial dominant by the perspective of those dominated. He transforms the margins into a new center of imaginative power.  In his vision, ~the wounds and insults of history become touchstones of dignity and hallmarks of epic design. He also remakes the hero in a new image, as we shall see through a closer look at his dialogue with Vergil and Homer.

III. Dialogue with Vergil & Homer Wins New Epic Ground

One large dialogue is suggested by the three thematic fields in Omeros--village, city, and farm--which bring to mind the threefold patterning in Vergil. His life work famously developed in three stages. First the Bucolics, the so-called pastorals, centered on herders depicted as lovers, poets, even prophets or magicians. In the middle were the longer Georgics, centered on farming and the conditions of passion and work. Finally the Aeneid narrated the hero’s passage from the loss of one city, Troy, towards the origin of another, Rome, representing travel as return to the ancestral home. Also within each poem, pastoral, georgic, and Roman motifs worked with and against each other, as in the first eclogue, where forces from the city dominate the country, with power to protect or displace.
 

The analogy for a pastoral level in Omeros must be the village where lower class characters, agitated by love or tormented by historic pain, seeking roots, undergo extraordinary transports on extraordinary missions. Not herding but fishing defines the economy--a shift that has precedents. In the Renaissance, Jacopo Sannazaro composed in Latin verse his so-called piscatory eclogues, featuring fishermen at the little port of Mergellina in Naples.  Theocritus, too, had portrayed an old fisherman on a cup in idyll 1 and he (or an emulator) made fishermen oppressed by poverty the characters in idyll 21.
The urban level in Omeros encompasses the centers of power in Europe and the cold North, with their monuments of empire, which lure and yet alienate the Narrator. Provincial Castries by its very name suggests an outpost of empire, the Roman encampment, castra, like English towns in -caster and -chester. Another trace of empire is the motto assigned Castries because of its fine harbor, proudly reversing Vergil’s account of Tenedos, where the Greek ships lurked before returning to destroy Troy: statio male fida carinis (an anchorage unsafe for ships: Aeneid 2.23). Walcott undercuts imperial pretense with pastoral irony in Another Life, his autobiographical poem, which represents a colonial schoolmaster interrogating a pupil:
 

“What is the motto of St. Lucia, boy?”
“Statio haud malefida carinis.”
“Sir!”
“Sir!”
“And what does that mean?”
“Sir, a safe anchorage for sheeps.” (3.I)
 

Between the village and the cities lie the farms that so broadly yet strangely enrich the thematic range, appropriating colonial history through the idiosyncratic medium of Plunkett’s crazed research, also absorbing natural history through Maud’s garden and artful quilt, and further, through Catherine Weldon, capturing the impact on the northern Indians of Manifest Destiny and Puritan pride.
 

A more particular dialogue with Vergil underlies the Narrator’s meeting with his Father’s Ghost at the end of Book One. Everything about the encounter--its prominent placement, its length occupying two full chapters, above all its theme of inheritance and drama of paternal counsel--give it crucial programmatic significance in the design of the whole work. Already the first segment not only claims the legacy of Shakespeare, as we noted earlier, but puts it to use by employing the theme of the father’s ghost: “that disease | like Hamlet’s old man’s spread from an infected ear” (68.9).
The encounter shifts from the old home to stroll through town as the Ghost reminisces: (71.2-5)
 

“I grew up where alleys ended in a harbour
and Infinity wasn’t the name of our street;
where the town anarchist was the corner barber

with his own flagpole and revolving Speaker’s seat.
There were rusted mirrors in which we would look back
on the world’s events. There, toga’d in a pinned sheet

the curled hairs fell like commas. On their varnished rack,
The World’s Great Classics read backwards in his mirrors
where he doubled as my chamberlain. I was known

for quoting from them as he was for his scissors.
I bequeath you that clean sheet and an empty throne.”
 

With affectionate satire, Walcott characterizes the local culture as provincial, with its backward look at events and reduced imperial emblems: pole, parliamentary Speaker, Roman senatorial toga, royal chamberlain and throne. The World Classics are packaged for popular consumption and “read backwards” in “rusted mirrors.” Two final puns, however, turn programmatic. The “clean sheet” and “empty throne” of the barber metaphorically suggest an opportunity for poetic ambition. The Nobel was in the air.
Yet the Ghost rejects one kind of reach beyond the local:
 

“The rock he lived on was nothing. Not a nation
or a people,” my father said, <“>and, in his eyes,
this was a curse. When he raged, his indignation

jabbed the air with his scissors, a swift catching flies,
as he pumped the throne serenely around to his view.
He gestured like Shylock: <‘>Hath not a Jew eyes?<‘>

making his man a negative. An Adventist,
he’s stuck on one glass that photograph of Garvey’s
with the braided tricorne and gold-fringed epaulettes

and that is his other Messiah. His paradise
is a phantom Africa. Elephants. Trumpets.
And when I quote Shylock silver brims in his eyes.<“> (72.4-15)
 

 The Narrator represents the Ghost as reporting the barber’s frustration with St Lucia, which the barber used to call a mere rock, a nothing, not a “nation”,  not a “people.” Failing to find a political identity under imperial rule, the barber was one of many who hearkened to Marcus Garvey’s dream of Africa, which the Ghost’s language undercuts as an illusion cobbled together with memories of African-Roman wars. Paradise, in the rest of the poem, is to be sought and variously attained or lost in St Lucia. Not that any and all relations with Africa are ruled out. Walcott will create his own original relationship in Achille’s hallucinatory quest for his ancestor (followed by the Narrator’s affirmation of black identity in Book Three). In a characteristic nuance, however, St Lucian Helen will refuse the African ancestor’s name for her child.
Moving through town towards the harbor, the Ghost warns against another temptation, this one white: (72.16-73.3)
 

“Walk me down to the wharf.”
                                      At the corner of Bridge
Street, we saw the liner, as white as a mirage,
its hull bright as paper, preening with privilege.
 

“Measure the days you have left. Do just that labour
which marries your heart to your right hand: simplify
your life to one emblem, a sail leaving harbour
 

and a sail coming in. All corruption will cry
to be taken aboard. Fame is that white liner
at the end of your street, a city to itself,
 

taller than the Fire Station, and much finer,
with its brass-ringed portholes, mounting shelf after shelf,
than anything Castries could ever hope to build.”
 

Against the shimmering, city-like lure, the Ghost evokes ideals of measure and focus that carry an ethical weight that can make anyone pause to take stock of time and talents and how they get used. The ethics also imply an esthetics. The sketch of the liner betrays personal and artistic temptation (words reecho among themselves in a kind of verbal mirage: whITE and brIGHT, then PaPeR, PReen, and PRivilege), by contrast with the emblem of simple craft.  Allegory becomes explicit when the liner is identified as Fame and compared to a city, with emphasis on how far it overreaches the values that are local and black. The parable closes towards evening, as the white leviathan departs and a harmony both local and cosmic returns. In the context, “black,” no longer simply a color, takes on ethical dimensions: (73.19-21)
 

  ... and the black waves
settle down to their level. The stars would renew
their studded diagrams over Achille’s canoe.
 

Any such warning against temptation recalls, however, the frequent formula of demurral in classical poets, the so-called recusatio, where “a conviction of superiority” lurks “beneath a display of mock-modesty.”  The Ghost’s negative examples serve as foils to positive accomplishments of the poem. Africa enters through the device of Achille’s quest with its return to St Lucia and the poem wins its own version of fame, built from the start in Castries but reaching further than the liner, winning a place on the classic shelf of a world more polyphonic than the Ghost could know: surely talk of the Nobel was in the air.
The directives come to a climax that is emphatically local and black: (75.10-76.3)
 

“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...
 

because the couplet of those multiplying feet
made your first rhymes. Look, they climb, and no one knows them;
they take their copper pittances, 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.”
 

The punning link between workers’ feet and the “feet” of poetic measure asserts a distinctly St Lucian origin and mission for the work, going beyond Homer and Shakespeare~.  The themes of “made” and “first” echo classical stories of origin--the etiological myths that so frequently defined poetics, as when the Muses “first” greeted Hesiod on Helicon,  Callimachus “first” placed tablet on knees,  or a god at Rome “first” gave an oracle to Vergil’s Tityrus imposing the new cultural dominant.
Taken as a whole, the encounter between father and son also suggests a particular dialogue with Vergil, evoking the sixth book of the Aeneid, where the shade of Aeneas’s father Anchises showed his son a parade of Roman warriors to emulate. Anchises drove home his message in a climactic summary that has implications also both ethical and aesthetic:
 

excudent alii spirantia mollius aera
(credo equidem), vivos ducent de marmore vultus,
orabunt causas melius, caelique meatus
describent radio et surgentia sidera dicent:
tu regere imperio populos, Romane, memento
(hae tibi erunt artes) pacisque imponere morem,
parcere subiectis et debellare superbos.
    (Aen. 6.847-53)
(Others will hammer out more softly breathing bronzes,
I believe, coax living features out of marble,
plead legal cases better, with their measure mark
the movements of the sky and tell when constellations rise.
You remember, Roman, to rule with empire peoples
(these will be your arts), impose the way of peace,
spare those you conquer and beat down the proud.)
 
 

Vergil contrasts the artful facility of the Greeks to the new cultural dominant of Rome. The dialogue privileges not only Roman history over Greek craft but implicitly his own version of epic over Homer’s. The comparable visit to the underworld in the Odyssey provided the hero with only personal and generic lore, not imperial fate.
In like manner, then, Walcott’s exemplary black women contrast with Vergil’s parade of Roman conquerors. Walcott has asserted local and Caribbean values over against previous epic and done so in recognizably epic way, providing an etiology for his poetics which has both esthetic and ethical thrust.  His program is both political and prophetic. It projects a world in which culture will be increasingly hybrid and referential across arbitrary bounds.
Parenthetically, I note that the importance of such scenes of poetic self-definition, and our interest in them, have recently been urged by a careful theorist: “Without some idea of the poet as aetiologist, as mobilizer of his own tradition, ever tendentious and ever manipulative, our accounts of literary tradition will always turn out too flat.”
 

Further hints of Walcott’s new stance in and against tradition emerge from traces of a dialogue with Homer that must suffice as our final examples here. They link the beginning, the middle, and the end of the poem in ways that again suggest tradtional epic design.
Omeros opens with two scenes that bridge the whole action of the poem in terms of imaginary time: looking back from after the end of the main plots to a moment before they began when the fishermen cut primordial trees for their canoes.  The transition from this detached preamble into the village plot bears watching: (1.I.ii.60-iii.1)
 

one [canoe] would serve Hector and another, Achilles. (8.9)
   iii
Achille peed in the dark, then bolted the half-door shut. (8.10)
 

Achilles // Achille: the Latin form of the name suggests the hero of tradition;  the French drops us into the village plot. The nuanced language, however, may well be overshadowed by shock at the verb. No latrines are reported from ten years at Troy or anywhere else in the epic world. The verb triggers a dizzying search of the databank. When Leopold Bloom moved himself in Ulysses, scandal ensued. Leave it to Joyce. Somewhere in Finnegan’s Wake, if I am not mistaken, Rome came and saw and built a water closet.
Achille had a more traditional mark in the preamble: while he gaped at the sky where a tree had been cut, “A thorn vine gripped | his heel. He tugged it free.” (6.5-6). The classical mytheme of the vulnerable heel was naturalized to the forest setting.
 

In Book Three, during Achille’s dream journey, his African ancestor Afolabe insisted that names must be proper to what they name. But Achille insisted that his name was a “sound whose meaning I still do not care to know” (138.5). This show of diffidence is ironic in two ways. The name had been imposed on Achille’s enslaved ancestor by a colonial master, as we hear in another scene; also, as latter-day readers, we know it contains the Greek roots achos and laos, meaning “pain for the people.”  From our standpoint, the sounds have a meaning that Achille might well consciously avoid but which his action has just unwittingly fulfilled. When Achille denied that names have meaning, says Walcott, “the tribe began to grieve” (138.3). Similarly, but even more paradoxically, the African name Afolabe contains a hint of Greek roots that tie into the story: apo- and labe (“from, away” and “take, seize”) seem only too suited to the figure who believes that names are proper to what they name and who is about to become the archetypal victim of enslavement.
When the slave raid decimates the village, Achille rushes into vain action as if to block (revoke) the history of slavery (not unlike Aeneas in the Aeneid’s second book trying to defend Troy against its traditional fall): (148.10-15)
 

and the one thought thudding in him [Achille] was, I can deliver
all of them by hiding in a half-circle, then I could
change their whole future, even the course of the river
 

would flow backwards, past the mangroves. Then a cord
of thorned vine looped his tendon, encircling the heel
with its own piercing chain. He fell hard....
    3.XXVII.iii
 

The mytheme of the vulnerable heel, no longer neutral, serves to maintain the cruel history. The terms of vulnerability double, both the anatomical “tendon” and the mythic “heel.” Then metaphor--”its own piercing chain”--links the vine with the historical chains of enslavement. The old mytheme becomes a crucial link in the new narrative of historic pain.
Closure comes, finally, in the manner of classical structures, as motifs return for a recursive splurge. The blind Omeros guides the Narrator’s underworld tour, upstaging Vergil’s Sibyl and Dante’s Virgilio. The poem gets much mileage out of recapitulating what it is letting go. In the last chapter the scenes form a sequence of complementary codas that return for climactic variations on leading themes. The first coda opens by looking back on Achille and inviting comparison with earlier definitions of heroism: (320.7-15)
 

I sang of quiet Achille, Afolabe’s son,
who never ascended in an elevator,
who had no passport, since the horizon needs none,
 

never begged nor borrowed, was nobody’s waiter,
whose end, when it comes, will be death by water
(which is not for this book, which will remain unknown
 

and unread by him). I sang the only slaughter
that brought him delight, and that from necessity--
of fish, sang the channels of his back in the sun.
 

The themes belong to traditional epic openings (“song of one who...”), but the content differs in ways that spell out Walcott’s new position in epic. This is not the Iliad, with its Muse invoked to sing the wrath of an old king’s son, which sent many sufferings to the people.  Nor does Omeros replicate the Odyssey, where the Muse tells of a man of many ways--famously tricky and travelled--, who suffered and begged. In the Aeneid the poet did take over the singing, but he told of a hero who was the first to make the epoch-making trip that laid foundations for empire.
 

The contrastive litany not only confirms Walcott’s mastery of the epic genre’s “capacity to reinvent itslf through inversion, opposition to epic predecessors, and ironic self-reflexion,” as Farrell rightly says.  Walcott also roots his new epic in a Caribbean perspective articulated with prophetic authority by Aimé Césaire, who celebrates alternative cultural values:
 

Ceux qui n’ont inventé ni la poudre ni la boussole
ceux que n’ont jamais su dompter la vapeur ni l’électricité
ceux qui n’ont exploré ni les mers ni le ciel
mais ils savent en ses moindres recoins le pays de souffrance
ceux qui n’ont connu de voyages que de déracinements...
(Those who have not invented gunpowder or the compass,
those who have never learned to master electricity or steam,
those who have not explored the seas or the sky,
but know each slightest nook in suffering’s land,
those who have known no travels but being torn from roots...)
 

Walcott completes his new epic edifice with a final revision of the angry Achilles in the very last coda, which closes in the classic manner as a day’s work ends:
an octopus wrung its hands at the slaughter
from the gutting knives. Achille unstiched the entrails
and hurled them on the sand for palm-ribbed mongrels
and the sawing flies... (324.6-9)
 

...A triumphant Achilles,
his hands gloved in blood, moved to the other canoes,
whose hulls were thumping with fishes... (324.12-14)

then they helped him haul In God We Troust back in place,
jamming logs under its keel. He felt his muscles
unknotting like rope. The nets were closing their eyes,
 

sagging on bamboo poles near the concrete depot.
In the standpipe’s sandy trough aching Achilles
washed sand from his heels, then tightened the brass spigot
 
 

to its last drop. An immense lilac emptiness
settled the sea. He sniffed his name in one armpit.
He scraped dry scales off his hands. He liked the odours
 
 

of the sea in him. Night was fanning its coalpot
from one catching star. The No Pain lit its doors
in the village. Achille put the wedge of dolphin
 
 

that he’d saved for Helen in Hector’s rusty tin.
A full moon shone like a slice of raw onion.
When he left the beach the sea was still going on. (324.19-325.9)
 

This last round of dialogue with Homer translates the terms of epic battle into the piscatory vein. “Achille unstiched the entrails,” gives us the local form of the name, with internal echo (soft ch’s), and a metaphor for epic disembowlment expressed as women’s work. But the latinate “triumphant Achilles” reasserts the mythic paradigm for its final revision. “His hands gloved in blood” resonates against the figure of the murderous hero in Books 21 and 22 of the Iliad.
After the battle’s close, Walcott gives a final hint of the myth:
 

In the standpipe’s sandy trough aching Achilles
washed sand from his heels,
 

The alliterative “aching Achilles” evokes the Greek etymology, but here “pain” derives from honest work rather than egotistical rage and is felt not by the people but by the worker himself. In any other context, “washed sand from his heels” would seem a touch of realism in keeping with the other motifs of closure; but we remember the part this mytheme played in the whole poetic structure, from the initial hint to the intersection with history, to this final sense of relief.
 

Lest we relax with our hero, Walcott throws us another challenge: “He sniffed his name in one armpit.” Hardly Homer’s hero: such mundane intimacy would be unthinkable in the Iliad, where anatomy exists mainly to be pierced, sliced, lopped off in battle. Indeed Walcott having detached the name from its Homeric etymology, “pain for the people,” seems to suggest a more innocent meaning through paronomasia between Achille and the French word for armpit, aiselle.  The ominous heroic name has been emptied of its painful tradition in a way that again recalls Césaire, as he rejects boastful and inflated claims to past heroism:
 

Non, nous n’avons jamais été amazones du roi du Dahomey, ni princes de Ghana avec huit cents chameaux, ni docteurs à Tombouctou Askia le Grand étant roi, ni architects de Djénné, ni Madhis, ni guerriers. Nos ne nous sentons pas sous l’aisselle la démangeaison de ceux qui tinrent jadis la lance.
(No, we have never been amazons of the king of Dahomey, nor princes of Ghana with eight hundred camels, nor doctors at Timbuctu when Askia the Great was king, nor architects of Djénné, nor Madhis, nor warriors. We do not feel beneath our armpit the itch of those who wielded long ago the lance.)
 

With Achille freed of traditional pain, the focus shifts to a retrospective illumination and final convergence of plots: the No Pain Cafe lit its doors. Comparing the moon, then, to a sliced raw onion may bring tears of recognition to comparatists, if they spot a paradoxical variation on Diana’s history as an epic theme.  By now we recognize in Walcott a past master of the tradition of provoking comment, which itself weaves remembrance and fiction.  Our conversation like his sea will keep going on.

 John B. Van Sickle
 Brooklyn College & the Graduate School
  City University of New York
 http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/classics/jvsickle
  jvsickle@brooklyn.cuny.edu