White Egrets—Derek Walcott

[dropcap]I[/dropcap]f you’re anything like me, you would easily find and think that poetry is the most pliable of the literary arts. The sometimes soul-revealing lines of a poet could mean one thing to me, but when I hear the analysis of someone else, I quickly realize that it’s a possible meaning too. The poet however, is the only person who would truly know what he felt, thought and meant when writing those lines. Therefore, to recommend someone’s poetry, it would inevitably involve a little of me.

Derek Walcott’s White Egrets is reflective, as if he is coming to terms with age. In 2010, at age eighty, he may have felt that this collection of poetry would be his last offering to the mortal world. So did many of us , as for seven years White Egrets was marketed as his final book, a collection a bit milder with the aged workings of a once passionate, fiery man. That was until he bid his farewell with Morning, Paramin about three months before his passing.

But, White Egrets still has much to ponder and for a novice it could be easier to start at the end of Derek’s thoughts and build up to Omeros. Throughout the pages of White Egrets, the bird species among others serve not only as a second personality in some instances, but also as imagery—a bird’s artistic movements seemed to have special connotations to Walcott. Wherever the birds appear in the collection, they add meaning to the place he was. White Egrets quavers between first and third person, sometimes requiring the reader to travel with Walcott through his memories in time and place and other times listening to a wiser man chiding his younger self. He’s featured numerous little vignettes of locations as the poetry continues.

It’s clear that Walcott is in acceptance of natural processes in White Egrets, as certain motifs of nature keep springing up: sunrise and sunsets, the flow of water, breaking of waves and vivid landscapes. Walcott’s natural surroundings obviously bring him comfort in this collection whilst he gives the distillation of his experiences around the globe. He easily greets his own fate as a process of nature after learning from his encounters with others—many of which seemed to feature diabetes. After each, mostly alliterative title, Walcott also pens his regrets (which perhaps doesn’t coincidentally rhyme with egrets). In one poem he laments his treatment of a lover and in another he refers to his three wives.

Walcott seemed to be in a different dimension writing White Egrets, one that makes his age a perspective and a catalyst for his art. He contemplates the stark reality of heavy topics using light diction. Whether he was ready to leave us or not Derek Walcott had already faced some uneasy realities as he showed in this collection.