Derek Alton Walcott was born on January 23, 1930, in Castries, the capital of St Lucia, in the Lesser Antilles of the Caribbean. A painter, playwright and poet, Walcott was a son of the soil: a prodigal son who kept returning wiser and becoming more withdrawn. Navigating his peripatetic poetics, Walcott disembarked at Boston, Yale, Columbia and Harvard to teach poetry. In the summer of 2010, the Nobel laureate came to conduct workshops on drama and poetry at the Department of Literature, Film and Theatre Studies, University of Essex. Walcott’s arrival at Essex dredged up unsavoury echoes of the build-up to 2019 entrancing for Oxford professor of poetry, a prestigious accolade. Almost 100 academics circulated copies of the sexual harassment scandal hurled by a student at Harvard in 1982. A beau geste Walcott, a clear front runner, stole the thunder by resigning from the race. Essex seized the opportunity to secure Walcott as writer-in-residence for directing ensemble performances with young students; a dream team of amateur troupe; enacting Caribbean consciousness scarred with colonial imagination.

It would be unjust not to mention Dr Maria Cristina Fumagalli, a friend of the poet and a scholar of Caribbean literature who was hugely instrumental in bringing Derek to Essex. I met Prof Christina and her breezy smile a couple of times in the corridors of the department. What remained stuck in my mind was the sight of her descending the stairs holding the poet’s arm fondly ambling into the first class in April 2010 at Ivor Crewe Lecture Hall. Outside, clouds tousled on a sporadic blue of the sky and Walcott setting eyes on the English skies heaved, “I miss St. Louise.” In one of his earliest poems, As John to Patmos, he pledged “to praise love long, the living and the brown dead” of his home island, St Lucia. At heart, he never left his birthplace, but in his later life, he took intercontinental journeys and bloomed poetically by experiencing self-exile. Set to teach poetry to a motley of culturally diverse students at Essex, Walcott threw nostalgia as a feeler. To put it surrealistically, the poet entered the classroom to teach poetry and bridged the immediate physical space with memory as a metaphorical vehicle of integrating spaces (St Lucia, Europe, North America; the various base camps the poet pegged) before mounting hybrid poetic trajectories. Clearly, for a wanderer as fertile as Walcott, it was a state ‘recollected in tranquility.’ But for an exile, the tranquillity is perhaps an outpost between being at home and away from home and which the Irish poet Heaney out-learns: “I will feel lost/ unhappy and at home.” En passant, an associative shred of memory to date I snuggle with is my gallantry, opening the door for the poet who responded with an orchestrated smile under an aura of “leaf-green eyes.” Walking on air was my initiation into Walcott’s poetry class.

Though Walcott was not supposed to talk about his poetry, there were epiphanic spots, a vicarious but intentionally reined-in voice effusively global yet rooted in the mythical character of the Caribbean landscape made of coral reefs, craggy craters, volcanic ridges, and crystalline beaches. Noticeably, a poet saddled with the excesses of colonial history and memory freed his students from the cumbersome formalism of course outlines. He began canvassing his preferences for choosing to teach Thomas Hardy, Edward Thoams, and Auden. What awed me most was the way he roamed over every great poet from the Western tradition, quoting and injecting historical anachronism, picking on nuanced metaphors and lingual caveats, glossing and morphing them into his poetic logos. The first piece of poetry he dwelled upon at length was Thomas Hardy’s The Darkling Thrush; he spent hours on its rhythm, rhyme and cadences. His was a way of repetition iterating a line, excavating its buried sensuous appeal; afterwards quipping sallies, a sort of improvised ritual as if trying to create empathy for both Thrush and Hardy. The particular phrase Walcott stopped at and reflected somberly was Century’s corpse; Hardy lamented over the decline of Western culture; a thematic thread both Yeats and Eliot wove in their poetic litanies of mournful expansion— the eponymous The Second Coming and The Wasteland. On the sidelines, I kept brooding about why Walcott chose this poem by Hardy. It took me a few years to figure out that by reading Hardy’s poem, Walcott was quaintly locking horns with the history of colonial invasion and its painful legacy. The self-inducing image of a bird flying lazily was now “an aged thrush, frail, gaunt, and small,” perhaps a reminder of Walcott’s ego-depletion, both at material and poetic level, let alone the mixed agony of using and questioning the English language/ culture at the expense of Caribbean mythos.

Walcott’s teaching of poetry pivoted on hard work. He toiled, repeating particular lines, paused, and contemplated as if shushing, “every word is made of ound.”

In A Far Cray from Africa, the poet cannot hold it back anymore: “how choose/ Between this Africa and the English tongue I love?” Being a bearer of divisive cultural roots, Walcott revisits the English poetic canon both as an insider and an outsider. The paradox of living with a fluid identity leaves the poet wondering: “I who am poisoned with the blood of both, Where shall I turn, divided to the vein.” Conversely, in Omeros (1999), he makes no bones about his strings tied to his homeland, what many critics considered his magnum opus, a highly experimental poem, the poet re-imagines ancient Greek myths transplanting them into modern-day St Lucia. To support this, he drums out his manifesto with a heroic flourish, “What drove me was duty: duty to the Caribbean light.” Omeros is a poem as long as a novel. Its narrative breadth compliments the inclusiveness of its historical scope ranging from the Caribbean back in time to ancient Greece, the British Empire and the 19th Century United States. Not surprisingly, the poet is in debt to Western literary aesthetics as he conjures fictional alter-egos of Joseph Conrad, Herman Melville, James Joyce, and, of course, Homer. Markedly evident, writers who wrote about the twin burden of exile and creativity induced Walcott’s imagination. Therefore, Walcott’s subservience to ‘duty’ is not harrowingly nationalist but rather a heartening inclusion of human history. Consequently, the rationale behind reading The Darkling Thrush surfaced conspicuously.

When Hardy wrote The Darkling Thrush in 1900, the British Empire had expanded to include almost 4 million square miles. Poems of the Past and the Present (1901), which includes The Darkling Thrush, also contains many poems revealing Hardy’s disquietude with British imperialism. Jane L Bownas, Thomas Hardy and Empire: The Representation of Imperial Themes in the Work of Thomas Hardy (2013) is a groundbreaking study debunking the smug mythification of Hardy’s homely nationalism, ‘Englishness’ and pastoralism. In fact, Hardy challenged imperialism. There are numerous references to the Roman Empire in his novels. Walcott, in my view, nudged students’ imagination into palimpsest and contrapuntal readings of the British canonical works; Hardy’s The Darkling Thrush served as an apt psycho-geographic counterpart to the mythic darkness floating over The River Thames in Conard’s Heart of Darkness.

In good faith, the poet assumed brinkmanship, speaking to an audience of the legatees of colonialism. By implication, the duty of a poet towards himself and his recipients was a strand that also surfaced in his teaching of poetry. To that end, he poked at poems’ slumbering biographical layers, rousing up connections between the reader and the poet. As everyone brought their samples to the class, I was among the fortunate ones whom Walcott asked to recite a poem. Then he picked the word ‘flit’ that I had used, and mused beamingly, “What kind of word is flit?” Then he lavished time on poets’ conspicuous immersion in words, which Heaney famously calls “the music of what happens.” Walcott had a way with language like other greats of his era, such as Heaney and Joseph Brodsky, with whom he enjoyed long-term friendships. Thankfully, my memory, an endurable chaos, is still etched with that moment when, at the end of one class he gave me a few minutes. With a bouch ouverte I asked, “Have you heard about a poet Iqbal from the Indian continent – “Nope.” Next, he took us by surprise, saying that he could not comprehend half of the American poet Hart Crane, the one who wrote the famous The Bridge: To Brooklyn Bridge. And then he asked if you wanted a ‘showdown’ between a poet and a reader. Silence.

Walcott’s teaching of poetry pivoted on hard work. He toiled, repeating particular lines, paused and contemplated as if shushing, “Every word is made of sound.” Today, when I teach poetry and poets like Auden, Larkin, Plath and Ted Hughes, I employ Derek’s incantatory practice of embracing particular lines again and again; the raw delight of possessing the flesh of a poem. To take this further, The Prodigal (2004) shows Walcott’s religious intensity for words, a creed he and Heaney jointly observed; “The dialect of the scrub in the dry season/ withers the flow of the English,” and “every noun is a stump,” while ‘rain’ comes in ‘paragraphs,’ above all “creole language rushes like weeds.” Reading this, my mind returns to Hardy’s The Darkling Thrush, in which the English landscape breeds language.

Against sensational allegations and a ridiculous theatre of egos vying for Oxford professorship of poetry in 2009, Walcott remained silent. The next year, when he joined Essex, White Egrets came out, a marvellous meditation on grief and death as the poet like Hardy’s thrush is now ‘gaunt.’ For most of his life, often in dialogue with his divided identity, he brought a cargo of endurance crossing over the English Channel, touching down poetry class, an experience made over in his Nobel lecture: “Break a vase, and the love that reassembles the fragments is stronger than that love which took its symmetry for granted when it was whole.”

The writer is an English-language poet based in Lahore. His first collection of poems Lahore I Am Coming (2017), was published by the Punjab University Press