Kneel to Your Load

Greetings, everyone, from the anchorage of a sunny Thursday. I hope Omeros will start to yield more and more delights as you get more accustomed to the demands of reading a "poem" like this, and as the layered stories/strands start to come into clearer focus. I'm never quite sure how to approach this work properly, at least in the early going: do we work forward in a sequential and linear fashion, or do we jump around based on thematic pursuits? I guess it must be a bit of both, but hopefully we can strike the right balance next week.

Anyway, you've got those three major levels to track: (1) the self-reflective and questing nature of the poet figure (who we can rather safely see as Walcott himself in this case (in Book IV you'll encounter many sections where he seems to struggle with his life in Boston; in Book V he feels uneasiness as a U.S. university professor ("Service. Under my new empire" (206)); and there's that interesting section (pp. 173-4: significantly, it's the only one written in couplets) in which he seems to describe the breakdown of his marriage). Try to track the questions and uncertainties he struggles with as you get deeper into the text; (2) the Achille/Hector/Helen plotline, which finds Walcott locating his epic material in the quarrels of two subsistence fishermen; and (3) the historiographic pursuits of Plunkett, who "decided that what the place needed / was its true place in history" (64) and who finally finds the "Homeric coincidence" (i.e., a ship named the Ville de Paris surrendering in a war "fought for an island called Helen" (100) (so named because of the way the French and British fought so fiercely over it). Some moments I think we should be sure to touch down on as we get going next Wednesday, and before we move on to the later books with Sarah's assistance, would be Book I, Chapter 5 (pp.24-32); Book 1, Chap. 12 & 13 (pp.67-76), Book 2, Chap. 14 (esp. pp.81-83), Book 3, Chap. 25 (pp.133-139), and Book 3, Chap. 32 (pp.165-68) (although, really, pretty much all of Book 3 is crucial).

St. Lucia, by the way, was first settled by Arawak Indians around 200 A.D., although by 800 their culture had been superseded by that of the Caribs; these early Amerindian cultures called the island “Iouanalao” (Island of the Iguanas). It was long believed Columbus discovered the island in 1502, but recent evidence suggests he merely sailed close by; in any event, there was no European presence until its settlement in the 1550s. Sometime around 1600 the Dutch arrived, which was followed by the first attempt at colonization in 1605. By mid-century the French arrived, which began that period of the island changing hands fourteen times. The British persevered, and by 1814, after that prolonged series of enormously destructive battles, the island was finally theirs (to this day, though, the French legacy is still evident in the Creole dialect). St. Lucia became independent within the British Commonwealth in 1979.

Personally, and do take issue if you think I'm overstating things, when I read Omeros I find myself feeling I'm immersed in the greatest poetic achievement that I've ever encountered. His extraordinary attention to the felicities and complexities of language, his deft managing of the technical demands of what he's attempting here, not to mention the intellect and wisdom that stand behind the content, seem to me to be above anything I've ever read before. I wonder if some of you wouldn't mind simply sharing here a passage or line or two that has stood out for you in terms of such accomplishments. I love (and could repeat over and over again) the assonance and consonance (and general euphony) of that "to please implacable Caesars" phrase (37), but there are no shortage of others: e.g., there's that gorgeous scene-painting that concludes Chapter VII (p. 42), when the speaker describes waking up "from that shallow sleep"; or when he refers to lightning as the Cyclone's "stilt-walking messenger" (52); or when he describes the "sucked-out sun, like a lozenge / on a blue Delft plate" (79); or when he describes the slaves watching "the Redcoats running between the trees, / dispersing like blossoms when the poinciana rattles its hanging bandoliers in the breeze" (81); or that extraordinary (and extraordinarily sad) scene in Book V when he describes the Sioux being ambushed at Wounded Knee, when the U.S. soldiers are figured as pines on the hill: "The pines have lifted their spears. / Except that the thick, serrated line on the slope was rapidly growing more pine-trees" (214).

Well, kneel to your load, indeed. But I hope it's proving to be a stimulating load. See you next Wednesday.