Hello and welcome to the Daily Poem. I'm Heidi White, and today is Monday, May 24th, 2021.

And today I'm going to read for you a poem by poet and playwright Derek Walcott, who lived from 1930 to 2017.

Walcott was born in the Caribbean on the island of St. Lucia.

He published his first poem at the age of just 14 years old and went on to build a long and illustrious career as a poet and a playwright.

And for his lifetime achievements, he received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1992. And today's poem is called

Sea Grapes. This is how it goes. That sail which leans on light, tired of islands, a schooner

beating up the Caribbean for home, could be Odysseus, homebound on the Aegean, that father and husband's longing

under gnarled sour grapes, is like the adulterer, hearing Nasekia's name and every

goal's outcry. This brings nobody peace. The ancient war between obsession and responsibility will never finish,

and has been the same for the sea wanderer or the one on shore now wriggling on his sandals to walk home,

since Troy sighed its last flame. And the blind giants boulder heaved the trough

from whose ground swell the great hexameters come to the conclusions of exhausted surf.

The classics can console, but not enough.

This is, although a relatively short poem, it is a poem that rewards very careful attention.

It has depths and many layers of meaning and interesting illusions.

And so I'm just going to point out a couple of things for your own thoughts and interpretations

and then encourage you to find this

poem and then read more of Derek Walcott, who I've just recently discovered, and man, I can't

stop reading him.

Anyway, let's start with the title, Sea Grapes.

Sea Grapes are a type of grape that's indigenous to the Caribbean and has a

particularly sour and bitter taste. This is an interesting interpretive key to the poem because

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