Hermit Diary, Montreal. 8. In Italy, Derek Walcott

View from the theatre at Segesta, Sicily toward the sea, oil pastel, 2018.

Many of us think of Derek Walcott first as a poet of the Caribbean, but he was widely-traveled and wrote some of his most evocative poems about, and in, the different places he found himself. In his elegiac book White Egrets, written late in life, there's a sequence of twelve poems under the title "In Italy." In the fourth poem, he speaks about coming to that beautiful country late in life, and how perhaps that was better. I feel the same way. Even though Italian art and music, and Italian food and their zest for life, had always meant a great deal to me, I didn't visit Italy in person until I was over 60. It was as if an impression I'd built in my mind finally took on its true color and sound, taste and smell, and became so much more vivid -- and also more nuanced -- than I had been able to imagine: I fell in love with Rome, with Palermo, with Catania, and the ancient Greek cities on the coasts; with the Roman pines and the lichen-covered ancient stones; the pale frescoes and glittery mosaics; the lemon trees and the blue sea; the wizened olive trees and vibrant purple artichokes and glistening fish markets; and most of all the people, without whom Italy would not be Italy. What they are going through now is so terrible, and yet the pictures of the streets that we see, and the people singing from their rooftops, are a moving and beautiful witness to what makes Italy, Italy. Walcott's poems capture some of that combination of beauty and melancholy. Here's the fourth and perhaps best-known one, because it appeared in The New Yorker, and in coming days I'll post a few more.

 

In Italy

IV.

Roads shouldered by enclosing walls with narrow
cobbled tracks for streets, those hill towns with their
stamp-sized squares and a sea pinned by the arrow
of a quivering horizon, with names that never wither
for centuries and shadows that are the dial of time. Light
older than wine and a cloud like a tablecloth
spread for lunch under the leaves. I have come this late
to Italy, but better now, perhaps, than in youth
that is never satisfied, whose joys are treacherous,
while my hair rhymes with those far crests, and the bells
of the hilltop towers number my errors,
because we are never where we are, but somewhere else,
even in Italy. This is the bearable truth
of old age; but count your benedictions—those fields
of sunflowers, the torn light on the hills, the haze
of the unheard Adriatic—while the day still hopes
for possibility, cloud shadows racing the slopes.

--Derek Walcott

Comments

[Pascale Parinda]

What a marvelous poem! Guess I gotta go read some more Walcott.

[Dale Favier]

Lovely

[Vivian Lewin]

I'm glad you are holding Italy in its less mutable form in our mind so we can stand with them across the leagues, Beth. And you have found the perfect way to do it.

[William F Knight]

Nice.

[Natalie]

Perfect post, Beth, with perfect accompaniment of your watercolour and that poem.

Italy is much on my mind at present, especially since I have family there, as you know. Some in Rome,some in Novara (near Milan). I spoke to them via Zoom a couple of days ago and they all okay but life under those restrictions is difficult, to say the least.