Phrasal Prosody

Walcott has said that he wanted the feel of great prose rather than a strong verse line.38 Cadenced rhythms rather than repeating ones, phrases that break over line ends and sentences that run on for several tercets at a time all contribute to a flow that rides across the frequently light rhyming. There are some two dozen rhyme types (see Appendix A) and most of them are some distance from the full masculine rhyme that engages the ear most easily. Apocopated or anagrammatic rhymes, eye rhymes and rhymes on unstressed syllables all help to push the rhyming into the background. He generally avoids that most insistent poetic voice, the rhymed couplet, except at the ends of sections and, of course, in section XXXIII/iii.

St Lucian patois is French in origin and Walcott’s English Creole has a strong French rhythm and syntax (see III/iii/9 or XX/ii/6-11). Callahan says the ‘syntax of the poem provides perhaps the best guide to understanding the work’s prosody’ and he supports the idea of a phrasal prosody depending on word group cadences, pointing out that this is a feature of French prosody.39

Certainly, Walcott’s cadences make a phrasal reading more appropriate than foot prosody. Further, beyond the phrase/sentence level, both rhythm and rhyme also obey a paragraphic grouping, with changes in metre or breaks in theterza rima/‘quatrain’

rhyme sequences at sense boundaries.

Some of this will be due to episodic and out-of-sequence composition, as Walcott himself has mentioned in respect of rhyme:

38

D. J. R. Bruckner, inCritical Perspectives on Derek Walcott, p. 398.

… if you write some sections later, to connect it like a long domino

backwards, sometimes if a rhyme is missing I regret it. But very often there is either something approximating rhyme, or… Like an internal rhyme, maybe. Quite close.40

However, there are many examples of true paragraphic style. For example, I/i/5, I/i/7, I/i/11 and I/i/22 all show breaks in the rhyme sequence that match the development of ideas. LV/i/8 and LV/i/15 are similar. In conversation with Bruckner, Walcott spoke of finding in Conrad and Kipling ‘the wit of the paragraph; mentally, it keeps the rhythm up…’.41

11.5 Caesurae

Speaking of how the poem came to take shape, Walcott talked of relying on the phrase rather than the sentence. ‘The metre of the poem would be dictated by the extent of the phrase that comes to mind – how many beats it has past the caesura. The poem doesn’t begin in front of the caesura, it begins in the second half of the

caesura…What is audible in a line is a remembered half of a forgotten preceding beat.’42

Most of the poem uses the single caesura per line, moving it with complete flexibility so that there is no sense of regularity. However, the hexameter line is long enough to

40 _{Derek Walcott, interviewed by Luigi Sampietro,Caribana 3}

41 _{Derek Walcott, interviewed by D. J. R. Bruckner,A Poem in Homage to an Unwanted Man(New}

York Times, Oct 9, 1990) quoted by Hamner,Epic of the Dispossessed: Derek Walcott’s Omeros, p. 35.

permit more than one caesura and Walcott frequently drops into a double caesural form. He uses double or occasionally triple caesurae to present us with a series of clauses in a succinct form, stripped of superfluous syntax. So XLIX/iii/9, ‘My braceleted Circe/was gone, like the shining drizzle, far now, at sea.’ and XLII/ii/1, ‘November. Sober month. The leaves’ fling was over.’ and XLII/i/12, ‘Snow brightened the linen, the pepper, salt domes, the gables/of the napkin, silencing Warsaw, feathering quiet Crackow;’.

He also does so in his dialogue passages with his mother (XXXII/i/11-15) or with Omeros (LVI/iii/12-14) or between Afolabe and Achille (XXV/iii/6-9), where it gives a theatrical immediacy to the voices. Incomplete sentences rely on context to make their sense clear and are colloquial in tone if not in vocabulary. He uses the double caesura in the passage with Omeros (LVI/iii/12-13), setting out the conversation on the page in a descending form that mimics playfully the descent of the goat-track.

11.6 Humour

There are many examples of such playfulness in the way form, rhyme and rhythm are deployed, as should be expected in a Caribbean ‘epic’. The folk culture of

calypso/kaisodepends on playful rhyme and flexible rhythm. Sir Philip Sherlock,

commenting on a Walcott image, said. ‘The last image is perfect Trinidad

calypsonian. […] his gift for “taking bad somet’ing mek laugh” reveals his Caribbean mind better than a thousand hosannahs.’43Burnett comments that ‘[r]elish of the

43

Sir Philip Sherlock,Foreword: Caribbean Quarterly Vol. 38, no. 4(Kingston: University of the West Indies, December 1992), p. viii.

comedy of language is a Walcott hallmark’.44 Walcott himself said, ‘if the speech were not interesting – if the convolutions, the dictions, the novelty and the sounds were not alive, it would not produce writers.’45

He spoke approvingly of the idea of fun in poetry and language, when, instead of Melville or Hemingway, ‘I picked up the Betjeman, and I began to read it, and I was reading it withcompletedelight and much more respect and fun, you know, than all

the other guys on the shelves – very few of them have any fun…And Auden also had a lot of fun. That’s the great thing about Auden, there’s a lot of humo[u]r, a lot of wit, and a lot of fun.’46

Aural and visual tricks abound. He often uses an eye or sight rhyme where the rhyme word involves seeing or blindness (see I/i/2-3, II/ii/17, III/ii/5, IV/iii/6). He even invents a variation on the eye rhyme which only works if you match one of the rhyme words to a missing heteronym (e.g.Troust/troughs/ prowsvia the missing ‘boughs’

(I/ii/19-20)), using this device several times. At XXIV/ii/13-21 Walcott produces an almost unbroken 27 lines of rhymes with a liquid ‘L’ sound to reflect stasis and the slop of waves against an idle boat. At XIII/iii/7 he speaks of rhyme as parentheses, then uses a palindromic rhythm four times to mimic the image (‘like those groaning women | will you achieve that height’ etc). He might even be ‘rhyming’ the words ‘elbow’ and ‘Pyrenees’ (‘knees’! See note to XXIX/iii/10-16).

44 _{Paula Burnett,Derek Walcott: Politics and Poetics, p. 149.}

45 _{Derek Walcott, interviewed by Nancy Schoenberger, 1983, reprinted inConversations with Derek}

Walcott, p.91.

46

Derek Walcott, interviewed by William Baer 1993, reprinted inConversations with Derek Walcott, p. 201.

Onomatopoeia, usually through alliteration, is frequent. There is also a form of visual pun (see the section on Metaphor for a discussion of Walcott’s verbal puns) in

passages where Walcott mimics sense through the physical appearance of the letters. For example, see I/i/22 where the letters ‘l’, then ‘u’, ‘w’ and ‘v’ represent the falling masts and the troughs of the waves. In LVIII/ii/7 he writes ‘the ‘I’ is a mast’, the letter forming a mast to the ship of the line (an absent pun) it appears in, but with the next words ‘a desk is a raft’ the person writing is both the ‘I’ and the mast, the desk is the (c)raft (we cannot avoid Walcott’s favourite metaphor here). Now other meanings of the metaphor kick in and we see the desk keeping the ego afloat ‘foaming with paper’, both sea-like and furious.

In III/ii/1, the repeated ‘g’, ‘b’ and ‘d’ mimic the curlicues of gingerbread on balconies and gables. Above all, the repeated ‘horned island’ not only uses a visual pun in ‘horned’, it is almost a visual palindrome as well.

In Burnett’s words, ‘[a]t every level, Walcott’s approach to language is ludic: the play of the signifier across meanings and discourses is endlessly surprising and rich. In the first instance he savours the quiddity of a word, its sound when voiced and its pattern when written. His verse often incorporates concrete poetry.’47