The poetry of Derek Walcott 1948-2013

From 25 Poems (1949)

The Fishermen Rowing Homeward …

In My Eighteenth Year

Private Journal

Letter to a Painter in England

A City's Death by Fire

As John to Patmos

I with Legs Crossed Along the Daylight Watch

From Epitaph for the Young: XII Cantos (1949)

Canto II

From Poems (1957)

The Dormitory

To Nigel

Hart Crane

The Sisters of Saint Joseph

Kingston-Nocturne

From in a Green Night (1948-60)

A Far Cry from Africa

Ruins of a Great House

Tales of the Islands

Return to Dennery, Rain

Pocomania

Parang

A Careful Passion

A Letter from Brooklyn

Brise Marine

Anadyomene

A Sea-Chantey

In a Green Night

Islands

From The Castaway (1965)

The Castaway

The Swamp

A Village Life

A Tropical Bestiary

Goats and Monkeys

Veranda

Nights in the Gardens of Port of Spain

God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen

Crusoe's Journal

Crusoe's Island

Codicil

From the Gulf (1969)

The Corn Goddess

from Metamorphoses: Moon

Junta

Mass Man

Miramar

Exile

The Train

Homage to Edward Thomas

The Gulf

Elegy

Blues

Air

Che

Negatives

Homecoming: Anse La Raye

The Cell

Star

Love in the Valley

The Walk

Hic Jacet

From Another Life (1973)

From Book I. The Divided Child: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5

From Book II. Homage to Gregorias: 8

From Book III. A Simple Flame: 14, 15

From Book IV. The Estranging Sea: 20, 21, 22, 23

From Sea Grapes (1976)

Sea Grapes

Adam's Song

Party Night at the Hilton

The Lost Federation

Parades, Parades

Dread Song

Names

Sainte Lucie

Ohio, Winter

The Chelsea

Love After Love

Dark August

The Harvest

Midsummer, Tobago

To Return to the Trees

From The Star-Apple Kingdom (1979)

The Schooner Flight

The Sea Is History

Egypt, Tobago

R.T.S.L.

Forest of Europe

Koenig of the River

The Star-Apple Kingdom

From the Fortunate Traveller (1982)

Old New England

North and South

Map of the New World

Roman Outposts

Greece

The Man Who Loved Islands

Jean Rhys

The Spoiler's Return

The Hotel Normandie Pool

Easter

The Fortunate Traveller

The Season of Phantasmal Peace

From Midsummer (1984)

I. "The jet bores like a silverfish through volumes of cloud-"

II. "Companion in Rome, whom Rome makes as old as Rome"

III. "At the Queen's Park Hotel, with its white, high-ceilinged rooms"

IV. "This Spanish port, piratical in diverseness"

V. "The hemispheres lie sweating, flesh to flesh"

VI. "Midsummer stretches beside me with its cat's yawn"

VII. "Our houses are one step from the gutter. Plastic curtains"

XIIII. "Today I respect structure, the antithesis of conceit"

XIV. "With the frenzy of an old snake shedding its skin"

XV. "I can sense it coming from far, too, Maman, the tide"

XVI. "So what shall we do for the dead, to whose conch-bordered"

XVII. "I pause to hear a racketing triumph of cicadas"

XIX. (Gauguin I and II) "On the quays of Papeete, the dawdling white-ducked colonists"

XXI. "A long, white, summer cloud, like a cleared linen table"

XXII. "Rest, Christ! from tireless war. See, it's midsummer"

XXIII. "With the stampeding hiss and scurry of green lemmings"

XXVIII. "Something primal in our spine makes the child swing"

XXIX. "Perhaps if I'd nurtured some divine disease"

XXX. "Gold dung and ruinous straw from the horse garages"

XXXI. "Along Cape Cod, salt crannies of white harbors"

XXXIV. "Thalassa! Thalassa! The thud of that echoing blue"

XXXV. "Mud. Clods. The sucking heel of the rain-flinger"

XXXVI. "The oak inns creak in their joints as light declines"

XXXVIII. "Autumn's music grates. From tuning forks of branches"

XLI. "The camps hold their distance-brown chestnuts and gray smoke"

XLII. "Chicago's avenues, as white as Poland"

XLVIII. "Raw ochre sea cliffs in the slanting afternoon"

L. "I once gave my daughters, separately, two conch shells"

LI. "Since all of your work was really an effort to appease"

LII. "I heard them marching the leaf-wet roads of my head"

LIV. "The midsummer sea, the hot pitch road, this grass, these shacks that made me"

From the Arkansas Testament (1987)

Cul de Sac Valley

The Three Musicians

Saint Lucia's First Communion

Gros-Ilet

White Magic

The Light of the World

Oceano Nox

To Norline

Winter Lamps

For Adrian

God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen: Part II

The Arkansas Testament

From the Bounty (1997)

The Bounty

2. Signs

5. Parang

6. "It depends on how you look at the cream church on the cliff"

8. Homecoming

10. "New creatures ease from earth, nostrils nibbling air"

16. Spain

21. Six Fictions

22. "I am considering a syntax the color of slate"

23. "I saw stones that shone with stoniness, I saw thorns"

26. "The sublime always begins with the chord 'And then I saw'"

28. "Awakening to gratitude in this generous Eden"

30. "The sea should have settled him, but its noise is no help"

31. Italian Eclogues

32. "She returns to her role as a seagull. The wind"

34. "At the end of this line there is an opening door"

37. "After the plague, the city-wall caked with flies, the smoke's amnesia"

From Tiepolo's Hound (2000)

I. "They stroll on Sundays down Donningens Street"

II. "What should be true of the remembered life"

III. "Flattered by any masterful representation"

XX. "Over the years the feast's details grew fainter"

XXI. "Blessed Mary of the Derelicts. The church in Venice"

XXII. "One dawn I woke up to the gradual terror"

XXIII. "Teaching in St. Thomas, I had never sought it out"

From The Prodigal (2004)

1. "In autumn, on the train to Pennsylvania"

2. "Chasms and fissures of the vertiginous Alps"

3. "Blessed are the small farms conjugating Horace"

4. "O Genoan, I come as the last line of where you began"

9. "I lay on the bed near the balcony in Guadalajara"

11. "The dialect of the scrub in the dry season"

12. "Prodigal, what were your wanderings about?"

18. "Grass, bleached to straw on the precipices of Les Cayes"

From White Egrets (2010)

1. "The chessmen are as rigid on their chessboard"

2. "Your two cats squat, heraldic sphinxes, with such"

3. "This was my early war, the bellowing quarrels"

4. White Egrets

5. The Acacia Trees

6. "August, the quarter-moon dangles like a bugle"

7. "It's what others do, not us, die, even the closest"

8. Sicilian Suite

10. In Italy

12. The Lost Empire

13. The Specter of Empire

14. Pastoral

15. A London Afternoon

21. A Sea-Change

23. "What? You're going to be Superman at seventy-seven?"

24. "The sorrel rump of a mare in the bush"

27. Sixty Years After

30. "All day I wish I was at Case-en-Bas"

32. "Be happy now at Cap, for the simplest joys-"

33. In Amsterdam

39. "For the crackle and hiss of the word August'"

43. Forty Acres

44. '"So the world is waiting for Obama,' my barber said"

45. "In the leathery closeness of the car through canefields"

46. "Here's what that bastard calls 'the emptiness'-"

47. Epithalamium: The Rainy Season

50. Barcelona

52. Elegy

54. "This page is a cloud between whose fraying edges"

Index of Titles and First Lines