Poetry to Walcott Is a Essay

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The object, therefore, is never the same to different people. The clouds vary from moment to moment. The mountains assume different hues. The boys frolic and constantly change their motions. And man's mood shifts in transformation. It is the perceiver, therefore, that crafts the other in his or her own image, whilst the other remains static in its essence. Perception therefore is a masquerade. And poetry is a glorified and euphomeous masquerade of the substance.

"Deities had entered the field" They were costumed actors and "What we generally call "Indian music" was blaring from the open platform shed from which the epic would be narrated" but consumed actors become "princes and gods" and the music itself became an evocation of Caribbean mysteries. Walcott correctly observes, "this was not theater" but "faith." Poetry, therefore, takes on the trappings of a religious ritual. It is religion in that it clothes the mundane in elevated settings of hope and glorification to a greater God. The observer no longer becomes an observer apart from the scene. Rather, he has become swallowed up by the scene -- allowed himself to become engorged by the circumstance and, being part of it, no longer sees himself apart. Observers of a religion perceive the rituals as particular actions broken up in time and concretized by their tangible form. The sacrament, for instance, becomes a person on bended knees opening his mouth and tasting a piece of bread as well as being fed some red wine. The worshipper, however, sees himself -- feels himself -- downing the blood and body of Jesus that enter his bloodstream and mix inside his body.

Similarly, poetry transforms one from observer into practitioner. No longer standing apart, he has allowed the scene to absorb him, to emasculate him and swallow him whole, and robbed of his rational capacities, the man may convert a donkey into a god. Faith -- the opposite of reality -- transforms the phantom into phantasmagoria.

To a traditionalist committed to memory of his country -- in this case to the person absorbed in his or her Caribbean culture -- such scenes would take on infinite delights since they were " visual echo of History" and history in Capitalization.

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No longer were they simply "costumed characters appearing" and disappearing in a mimicry performed in a certain geographical location, but they became the" heraldic profiles of the village princes. The evocation of vanished armies, temples, and trumpeting elephants " and their belief in what they were playing converted their performance into "the sacredness of the text, the validity of India."

Walcott beautifully compares the worshipper's perception of the scene -- in this case attachment of the participants to their Caribbean tradition - to a fragmented vase. The vase was once whole. It is now broken. Re-forming it will never make it the same and yet may recreate it into a more valuable substance than before since love goes into arduously and meticulously pasting the varied pieced together. One sees that the individual is attached to the vase "and the love that reassembles the fragments is stronger than that love which took its symmetry for granted when it was whole." Similarly, too, observes Walcott:

It is such a love that reassembles our African and Asiatic fragments, the cracked heirlooms whose restoration shows its white scars. This gathering of broken pieces is the care and pain of the Antilles… [the] restoration of our shattered histories, our shards of vocabulary, our archipelago [which becomes] a synonym for pieces broken off from the original continent.

Caribbean tradition making -- poetry in general - is not so much a making but a remaking. It converts a waving reed into a fantastical god, and converts of the real the unreal so that a city, a culture, or a nation becomes far more so. It becomes a paean unto eternity.

Reference

Walcott, D. The Antilles: Fragments of Epic Memory

http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1992/walcott-lecture.html.....

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