Derek Walcott's "Sea Grapes"
The Daily Poem
Goldberry Studios
4.6 • 729 Ratings
🗓️ 4 April 2024
⏱️ 10 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
West Indian poet and playwright Derek Walcott made his debut as an 18-year-old with In a Green Night. For many years he divided his time among Saint Lucia; Boston University, where he taught; and Trinidad, where he managed a theater. Walcott also worked as an artist and combined his poetry with painting in the volume Tiepolo’s Hound (2005).
Walcott’s works often deal with Caribbean history, while he simultaneous searches for vestiges of the colonial era. Western literary canon is revised and given a completely new form, as in the poetry collection Omeros (1990). In his writing Walcott explores the complexity of living and working in two cultures.
-bio via Nobel Foundation
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome back to The Daily Poem, a podcast from Goldberry Studios. |
| 0:04.1 | I'm Sean Johnson, and today is Thursday, April 4th, 2024. |
| 0:09.3 | Today's poem is by the St. Lucian poet, playwright, and Nobel Prize winner, Derek Walcott. |
| 0:16.5 | And it's called Sea Grapes. |
| 0:19.7 | I'll read it once, offer a few comments, and then read it one more time. |
| 0:23.6 | Here's sea grapes. |
| 0:29.6 | That sail which leans on light, tired of islands, a schooner beating up the Caribbean for home, could be Odysseus, homebound on the Aegean, |
| 0:41.1 | that father and husband's longing under gnarled sour grapes is like the adulterer hearing |
| 0:47.7 | Nassikaya's name in every gulls outcry. This brings nobody peace. The ancient war between obsession and responsibility will |
| 0:59.0 | never finish and has been the same for the sea wanderer or the one on shore now wriggling on |
| 1:04.6 | his sandals to walk home since Troy sighed its last flame, and the blind giants boulder heaved the trough |
| 1:13.1 | from whose ground swell the great hexameters come to the conclusions of exhausted surf. |
| 1:19.9 | The classics can console, but not enough. |
| 1:28.9 | A poem full of classical illusions, |
| 1:33.9 | mostly to Homer's epics, |
| 1:38.0 | the Odyssey in particular. |
| 1:41.3 | The speaker looks out, sees a ship on the water, and imagines belonging to Odysseus, homebound on the |
| 1:55.3 | Aegean, that husband and father longing for Ithaca, the wife and son that he left there. |
| 2:06.7 | But that longing is complicated in the third stanza of this reference to Odysseus as an adulterer. |
| 2:16.3 | He has, in fact, had extramarital affairs with goddesses during his long 10-year journey home. |
| 2:25.5 | Although this is a complicated aspect of Homer's epic, as many reading from a modern materialist viewpoint, |
| 2:41.8 | are quick or comfortable to use the word adultery to describe what Odysseus has done there. |
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