57 Derek Walcott Quotes on Poetry, Sea Grapes and Read - Quotes.pub

Here you will find all the famous Derek Walcott quotes. There are more than 57 quotes in our Derek Walcott quotes collection. We have collected all of them and made stunning Derek Walcott wallpapers & posters out of those quotes. You can use this wallpapers & posters on mobile, desktop, print and frame them or share them on the various social media platforms. You can download the quotes images in various different sizes for free. In the below list you can find quotes in various categories like Poetry, Sea Grapes and Read

Damn wind shift sudden as a woman mind.

Let them run ahead. Then I’ll have good reason for shooting them down. Sharpeville? Attempting to escape. Attempting to escape from the prison of their lives. That’s the most dangerous crime. It brings about revolution. So, off we go, lads!

We make too much of that long groan which underlines the past.

The voice does go up in a poem. It is an address, even if it is to oneself.

For there is a time in the tide of the heart, when Arrived at its anchor of suffering, a grave Or a bed, despairing in action, we ask O God, where is our home?

There is the buried language and there is the individual vocabulary, and the process of poetry is one of excavation and of self-discovery. Tonally the individual voice is a dialect; it shapes its own accent, its own vocabulary and melody in defiance of an imperial concept of language, the language of Ozymandias, libraries and dictionaries, law courts and critics, and churches, universities, political dogma, the diction of institutions. Poetry is an island that breaks away from the main.

Memory that yearns to join the centre, a limb remembering the body from which it has been severed, like those bamboo thighs of the god.

Caribbean culture is not evolving but already shaped. Its proportions are not to be measured by the traveller or the exile, but by its own citizenry and architecture. To be told you are not yet a city or a culture requires this response. I am not your city or your culture.

The English language is nobody’s special property.

If you know what you are going to write when you’re writing a poem, it’s going to be average.

How can I turn from Africa and live?

Art is History’s nostalgia, it prefers a thatched roof to a concrete factory, and the huge church above a bleached village.

A culture, we all know, is made by its cities.

The personal vocabulary, the individual melody whose metre is one’s biography, joins in that sound, with any luck, and the body moves like a walking, a waking island.

I come from a place that likes grandeur; it likes large gestures; it is not inhibited by flourish; it is a rhetorical society; it is a society of physical performance; it is a society of style.

I know when dark-haired evening put on her bright silk at sunset, and, folding the sea sidled under the sheet with her starry laugh, that there’d be no rest, there’d be no forgetting. Is like telling mourners round the graveside about resurrection, they want the dead back.

The sigh of History rises over ruins, not over landscapes, and in the Antilles there are few ruins to sigh over, apart from the ruins of sugar estates and abandoned forts.

She’s a rare vase, out of a cat’s reach, on its shelf.

I try to forget what happiness was, and when that don’t work, I study the stars.

I have never separated the writing of poetry from prayer. I have grown up believing it is a vocation, a religious vocation.

Visual surprise is natural in the Caribbean; it comes with the landscape, and faced with its beauty, the sigh of History dissolves.

Time is the metre, memory the only plot.

In Eden who sleeps happiest? The serpent.

Any serious attempt to try to do something worthwhile is ritualistic.

The time will come when, with elation, you will greet yourself arriving at your own door, in your own mirror, and each will smile at the other’s welcome.

Peel your own image from the mirror. Sit. Feast on your life.

To change your language you must change your life.

For every poet it is always morning in the world; history a forgotten, insomniac night. The fate of poetry is to fall in love with the world in spite of history.

Love After Love all your life, whom you have ignored for another, who knows you by heart. Take down the love letters from the bookshelf, the photographs, the desperate notes, peel your own image from the mirror. Sit. Feast on your life.

The English language is nobody’s special property. It is the property of the imagination: it is the property of the language itself.

I read; I travel; I become.

Sea Grapes"That sail which leans on light,tired of islands,a schooner beating up the Caribbeanfor home, could be Odysseus,home-bound on the Aegean;that father and husband'slonging, under gnarled sour grapes, islike the adulterer hearing Nausicaa's namein every gull's outcry.This brings nobody peace. The ancient warbetween obsession and responsibilitywill never finish and has been the samefor the sea-wanderer or the one on shorenow wriggling on his sandals to walk home,since Troy sighed its last flame,and the blind giant's boulder heaved the troughfrom whose groundswell the great hexameters cometo the conclusions of exhausted surf.The classics can console. But not enough.

...and either I’m nobody, or I’m a nation

Where are your monuments, your battles, martyrs?Where is your tribal memory? Sirs,in that gray vault. The sea. The seahas locked them up. The sea is History.First, there was the heaving oil,heavy as chaos;then, likea light at the end of a tunnel,the lantern of a caravel,and that was Genesis.Then there were the packed cries,the shit, the moaning:Exodus.Bone soldered by coral to bone,mosaicsmantled by the benediction of the shark's shadow,that was the Ark of the Covenant.Then came from the plucked wiresof sunlight on the sea floorthe plangent harp of the Babylonian bondage,as the white cowries clustered like manacleson the drowned women,and those were the ivory braceletsof the Song of Solomon,but the ocean kept turning blank pageslooking for History.Then came the men with eyes heavy as anchorswho sank without tombs,brigands who barbecued cattle,leaving their charred ribs like palm leaves on the shore,then the foaming, rabid mawof the tidal wave swallowing Port Royal,and that was Jonah,but where is your Renaissance?Sir, it is locked in them sea sandsout there past the reef's moiling shelf,where the men-o'-war floated down;strop on these goggles, I'll guide you there myself.It's all subtle and submarine,through colonnades of coral,past the gothic windows of sea fansto where the crusty grouper, onyx-eyed,blinks, weighted by its jewels, like a bald queen;and these groined caves with barnaclespitted like stoneare our cathedrals,and the furnace before the hurricanes:Gomorrah. Bones ground by windmillsinto marl and cornmeal,and that was Lamentations - that was just Lamentations,it was not History; then came, like scum on the river's drying lip,the brown reeds of villagesmantling and congealing into towns,and at evening, the midges' choirs, and above them, the spireslancing the side of Godas His son set, and that was the New Testament.Then came the white sisters clappingto the waves' progress,and that was Emancipation - jubilation, O jubilation - vanishing swiftlyas the sea's lace dries in the sun,but that was not History,that was only faith,and then each rock broke into its own nation;then came the synod of flies,then came the secretarial heron,then came the bullfrog bellowing for a vote,fireflies with bright ideasand bats like jetting ambassadorsand the mantis, like khaki police,and the furred caterpillars of judgesexamining each case closely,and then in the dark ears of fernsand in the salt chuckle of rockswith their sea pools, there was the soundlike a rumour without any echoof History, really beginning.

Selected Poems Quotes

I loved them as poets love the poetry that kills them, as drowned sailors the sea.

A Far Cry From Africa A wind is ruffling the tawny peltOf Africa. Kikuyu, quick as flies,Batten upon the bloodstreams of the veldt.Corpses are scattered through a paradise.Only the worm, colonel of carrion, cries:“Waste no compassion on these separate dead!”Statistics justify and scholars seizeThe salients of colonial policy.What is that to the white child hacked in bed?To savages, expendable as Jews?Threshed out by beaters, the long rushes breakIn a white dust of ibises whose criesHave wheeled since civilization’s dawnFrom the parched river or beast-teeming plain.The violence of beast on beast is readAs natural law, but upright manSeeks his divinity by inflicting pain.Delirious as these worried beasts, his warsDance to the tightened carcass of a drum,While he calls courage still that native dreadOf the white peace contracted by the dead.Again brutish necessity wipes its handsUpon the napkin of a dirty cause, againA waste of our compassion, as with Spain,The gorilla wrestles with the superman.I who am poisoned with the blood of both,Where shall I turn, divided to the vein?I who have cursedThe drunken officer of British rule, how chooseBetween this Africa and the English tongue I love?Betray them both, or give back what they give?How can I face such slaughter and be cool?How can I turn from Africa and live?

Para atender mejor el oficio del verso/arrodíllate

The Arkansas Testament Quotes

العين النّهمة تفترس المشهد البحري رغبةفي إبحارٍ ضئيل

The English language is nobody's special property. It is the property of the imagination: it is the property of the language itself. Derek Walcott

I shall unlearn feeling,unlearn my gift. That is greaterand harder than what passes there for life.

The classics can console. But not enough.

Classics Quotes Sea Grapes Quotes

I too saw the wooden horse blocking the stars.

Fate Quotes / The Odyssey Quotes Tricks Quotes

…and either I’m nobody, or I’m a nation.

To set out for rehearsals in that quivering quarter-hour is to engage conclusions, not beginnings, for one walks past the guilded hallucinations of poverty with a corrupt resignation touched by details, as if the destitute, in their orange-tinted back yards, under their dusty trees, or climbing into their favelas, were all natural scene designers and poverty were not a condition but an art. Deprivation is made lyrical, and twilight, with the patience of alchemy, almost transmutes despair into virtue. In the tropics nothing is lovelier than the allotments of the poor, no theater is as vivid, voluble, and cheap.

What the twilight says essays Quotes

Slowly my body grows a single sound, slowly I become a bell, an oval, disembodied vowel, I grow, an owl, an aureole, white firepoesia "Metamorfosi, I. Luna

But drunkenly, or secretly, we swore,Disciples of that astigmatic saint,That we would never leave the islandUntil we had put down, in paint, in words,As palmists learn the network of a hand,All of its sunken, leaf-choked ravines,Every neglected, self-pitying inletMuttering in brackish dialect, the ropes of mangrovesFrom which old soldier crabs slippedSurrendering to slush,Each ochre track seeking some hilltop andLosing itself in an unfinished phrase,Under sand shipyards where the burnt-out palmsInverted the design of unrigged schooners,Entering forests, boiling with life,Goyave, corrosol, bois-canot, sapotille.Days!The sun drumming, drumming,Past the defeated pennons of the palms,Roads limp from sunstroke,Past green flutes of the grassThe ocean cannonading, come!Wonder that opened like the fanOf the dividing frondsOn some noon-struck sahara,Where my heart from its rib cage yelped like a pupAfter clouds of sanderlings rustily wheelingThe world on its ancient,Invisible axis,The breakers slow-dolphining over more breakers,To swivel our easels down, as firmAs conquerors who had discovered home.

Another Life: Fully Annotated Quotes Poetry Quotes

She's a rare vase, out of a cat's reach, on its shelf.

The Odyssey Quotes

Art is History's nostalgia, it prefers a thatched roof to a concrete factory, and the huge church above a bleached village.

Omeros Quotes

I know when dark-haired evening put on her bright silk at sunset, and, folding the sea sidled under the sheet with her starry laugh, that there'd be no rest, there'd be no forgetting. Is like telling mourners round the graveside about resurrection, they want the dead back.

Love After Loveall your life, whom you have ignoredfor another, who knows you by heart.Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,the photographs, the desperate notes,peel your own image from the mirror.Sit. Feast on your life.

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