Envoi

Derek Walcott’s Omeros is well worth a Latinist’s attention. It is not just a poem of modem Caribbean life or some extraordinary classical revenant. Nor is it of interest only for its stock of classical allusions, though they are plentiful: its Achille and Hector vie for their Helen. Philoctete suffers a festering wound on his shin. Trees are felled, men struggle in the surf, voyages are undertaken, and passions flare with conspicuously Homeric coloring. Yet the poem’s classical roots are, for all those conscious echoes, not essentially Greek. It has too striking and complex a historical sense. Achille the fisherman also dreams of his African ancestors and their journey in chains across the ocean. The expatriate Major Plunkett studies the Battle of the Saints in compulsive detail while the native Hector salvages a bottle from the wreck of de Grasse’s flagship, the Ville de Paris. There is the blind sage called Seven Seas, who haunts Ma Kilman’s No Pain Cafe, and there is Omeros himself, Walcott’s companion and narrator of changing voices and changing roles, who conducts his own odyssey through modern Europe, Africa, and North America in search of history and his place in it.

Ancient history · Art · Battle · Literature · Passions · Poetry · History · Travel Writing and Literature