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The Virgins - Derek Walcott the dead streets of sun-stoned Frederiksted, the first free port to die for tourism, strolling at funeral pace, I am reminded of life not lost to the American dream; 5 but my small-islander’s simplicities can’t better our new empire’s civilized exchange of cameras, watches, perfumes, brandies for the good life, so cheaply underpriced that only the crime rate is on the rise 10 in streets blighted with sun, stone arches and plazas blown dry by the hysteria of rumor. A condominium drowns in vacancy; its bargains are dusted, but only a jeweled housefly drones 15 over the bargains. The roulettes spin rustily to the wind—the vigorous trade that every morning would begin afresh by revving up green water round the pierhead heading for where the banks of silver thresh. Line by Line Analysis Lines 1-2: "Down the dead streets of sun-stoned Frederiksted, the first free port to die for tourism, strolling at funeral pace, I am reminded of life not lost to ...

 Blues - Derek Walcott Those five or six young guys lunched on the stoop that oven-hot summer night whistled me over. Nice and friendly. So, I stop. MacDougal or Christopher Street in chains of light. A summer festival. Or some saint's. I wasn't too far from home, but not too bright for a nigger, and not too dark. I figured we were all one, wop, nigger, jew, besides, this wasn't Central Park. I'm coming on too strong? You figure right! They beat this yellow nigger black and blue. Yeah. During all this, scared on case one used a knife, I hung my olive-green, just-bought sports coat on a fire plug. I did nothing. They fought each other, really. Life gives them a few kcks, that's all. The spades, the spicks. My face smashed in, my bloddy mug pouring, my olive-branch jacket saved from cuts and tears, I crawled four flights upstairs. Sprawled in the gutter, I remember a few watchers waved loudly, and one kid's mother shouting like "Jackie" or "Terry,...

 The Prodigal - Derek Walcott I Prodigal, what were your wanderings about? The smoke of homecoming, the smoke of departure. The earth grew music and the tubers sprouted to Sesenne's singing, rain-water, fresh patois in a clay carafe, a clear spring in the ferns, and pure things took root like the sweet-potato vine. Over the sea at dusk, an arrowing curlew, as the sun turns into a cipher from a green flash, clouds crumble like cities, the embers of Carthage; any man without a history stands in nettles and no butterflies console him, like surrendering flags, does he, still a child, long for battles and castles from the books of his beginning, in a hieratic language he will never inherit, but one in which he writes "Over the sea at dusk, an arrowing curlew," his whole life a language awaiting translation? Since I am what I am, how was I made? To ascribe complexion to the intellect is not an insult, since it takes its plaid like the invaluable lizard from its background, and ...

Opening of Derek Walcott's poem "This Page Is a Cloud", the final poem in his collection "White Egrets" This page is a cloud between whose fraying edges a headland with mountains appears brokenly then is hidden again until what emerges from the now cloudless blue is the grooved sea and the whole self-naming island, its ochre verges, its shadow-plunged valleys and a coiled road threading the fishing villages, the white, silent surges of combers along the coast, where a line of gulls has arrowed into the widening harbour of a town with no noise, its streets growing closer like print you can now read, two cruise ships, schooners, a tug, ancestral canoes, as a cloud slowly covers the page and it goes white again and the book comes to a close. Source: https://www.scottishpoetrylibrary.org.uk/poem/untitled-no-54/ Annotation Line-by-Line Analysis: Line 1: "This page is a cloud between whose fraying edges…" Key phrase: "fraying edges"  Literary devic...

Midsummer, Tobago - Derek Walcott Broad sun-stoned beaches. White heat. A green river. A bridge, scorched yellow palms from the summer-sleeping house drowsing through August. Days I have held, days I have lost, days that outgrow, like daughters, my harbouring arms. Source: https://allpoetry.com/Midsummer,-Tobago Line-by-Line Analysis of "Midsummer, Tobago": Line 1: Keyphrase: "Broad sun-stoned beaches"  Literary device: Compound adjective, imagery  Meaning: Creates a vivid image of vast beaches baked under the intense sun, suggesting both beauty and harshness. Line 2: Keyphrase: "White heat"  Literary device: Sensory detail, metaphor  Meaning: Evokes the intense heat and its oppressive nature, possibly symbolizing emotional intensity or stagnation. Line 3: Keyphrase: "A green river"  Literary device: Juxtaposition, contrast  Meaning: Offers a contrast to the harshness with its image of coolness and life, suggesting a refuge or a reminder of natur...

Dark August - Derek Walcott So much rain, so much life like the swollen sky of this black August. My sister, the sun, broods in her yellow room and won't come out. Everything goes to hell; the mountains fume like a kettle, rivers overrun; still, she will not rise and turn off the rain. She is in her room, fondling old things, my poems, turning her album. Even if thunder falls like a crash of plates from the sky, she does not come out. Don't you know I love you but am hopeless at fixing the rain ? But I am learning slowly to love the dark days, the steaming hills, the air with gossiping mosquitoes, and to sip the medicine of bitterness, so that when you emerge, my sister, parting the beads of the rain, with your forehead of flowers and eyes of forgiveness, all with not be as it was, but it will be true (you see they will not let me love as I want), because, my sister, then I would have learnt to love black days like bright ones, The black rain, the white hills, when once I loved...

 A Far Cry From Africa - Derek Walcott 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. What is that to the white child hacked in bed? To savages, expendable as Jews? Threshed out by beaters, the long rushes break In a white dust of ibises whose cries Have wheeled since civilizations dawn >From the parched river or beast-teeming plain. The violence of beast on beast is read As natural law, but upright man Seeks his divinity by inflicting pain. Delirious as these worried beasts, his wars Dance to the tightened carcass of a drum, While he calls courage still that native dread Of the white peace contracted by the dead. Again brutish necessity wipes its hands Upon the napkin of a dirty cause, again A waste of our comp...