The Star-Apple Kingdom

by Derek Walcott

A collection of poems by the contemporary Caribbean poet treat a variety of themes from a poor sailor's fateful voyage northward from Trinidad to the search for democracy and social renewal in Jamaica

Genres: Poetry

58 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1979

About the author

Derek Walcott was a Caribbean poet, playwright, writer and visual artist. Born in Castries, St. Lucia, he won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1992 "for a poetic oeuvre of great luminosity, sustained by a historical vision, the outcome of a multicultural commitment."

His work, which developed independently of the schools of magic realism emerging in both South America and Europe at around the time of his birth, is intensely related to the symbolism of myth and its relationship to culture. He was best known for his epic poem Omeros, a reworking of Homeric story and tradition into a journey around the Caribbean and beyond to the American West and London.

Walcott founded the Trinidad Theatre Workshop in 1959, which has produced his plays (and others) since that time, and remained active with its Board of Directors until his death. He also founded Boston Playwrights' Theatre at Boston University in 1981. In 2004, Walcott was awarded the Anisfield-Wolf Lifetime Achievement Award, and had retired from teaching poetry and drama in the Creative Writing Department at Boston University by 2007. He continued to give readings and lectures throughout the world after retiring. He divided his time between his home in the Caribbean and New York City.

Reviews

[Billy O'Callaghan · Rating 5 out of 5]

A breathtaking book that offers richly impressionistic visions of Walcott's Caribbean across the span of a history defined by colonialism and its aftermath, and wild and varying mixture of ethnic cultures and traditions. Few in recent decades have wielded English with such inspired precision as Derek Walcott, and he is at the height of his powers here.
There is much here in terms of allusion and imagery for the academically inclined to feast on, but this is not work written solely for university classrooms to savour. Indeed, the casual poetry-loving reader will find eminent joy among these pages. Walcott writes for himself and for the world.
'The Star-Apple Kingdom' consists of ten poems, ranging from two- or three-page offerings to a dense twelve-page closer (the collection's title poem), and all are, in their way, exceptional. This is where you'll find some of his most acclaimed writing, such as “The Sea Is History”, rich in Biblical allusion, which considers the interaction between humankind and nature, weighs the passage of time, and seeks, in its way, to make some sense of identity as a notion (Where are your monuments, your battles, martyrs? / Where is your tribal memory? Sirs, / in that grey vault. The sea. The sea / has locked them up. The sea is History.). Or “R.T.S.L.”, an elegy to mark the passing of his dear friend, Robert Lowell (there was the startle of wings / breaking from the closing cage / of your body, your fist unclenching / these pigeons circling serenely / over the page…).
But rather than run through each poem in turn, I'll focus on one particular poem, the first of the collection, in order to give a taste of the kind of flavours on offer here.
Because Walcott hits his stride right from the start, with “The Schooner Flight”:

In idle August, while the sea soft,
and leaves of brown islands stick to the rim
of this Caribbean, I blow out the light
by the dreamless face of Maria Concepcion
to ship as a seaman on the schooner Flight.

From these vivid opening lines unfurl a long, magnificent poem, narrated as an inner monologue by the sailor, Shabine, a devoted poet, (self-described, in language harsh and beautiful: “I’m just a red nigger who love the sea, / I had a sound colonial education, / I have Dutch, nigger, and English in me, / and either I’m nobody, or I’m a nation...”) and building, across several pages, a small epic story, slipping in and out of the surreal, of one man's life, of culture, tradition and the unbreakable power of love, of an island man's natural inseparability from the sea, and of the very Caribbean itself. The music of the voice is truly eloquent here, and the imagery and similes heartbreaking in their imagination. Take these lines, plucked at random, from the section just inches from the end:

But things must fall, and so it always was,
on one hand Venus, on the other Mars;
fall, and are one, just as this earth is one
island in archipelagoes of stars.
My first friend was the sea. Now, is my last.

“The Schooner Flight” is not only one of Walcott's greatest creations but, in my very humble opinion, one of the finest in recent decades, and if the book were to consist of nothing more than this poem 'The Star-Apple Kingdom' would still be a towering achievement.

[Steven Godin · Rating 3 out of 5]

"The mountains rolled like whales through phosphorous stars,
as he swayed like a stone down fathoms into sleep,
drawn by that magnet which pulls down half the world
between a star and a star, by that black power
that has the assassin dreaming of snow,
that poleaxes the tyrant to a sleeping child.
The house is rocking at anchor, but as he falls
his mind is a mill wheel in moonlight,
and he hears, in the sleep of his moonlight, the drowned
bell of Port Royal's cathedral, sees the copper pennies
of bubbles rising from the empty eye-pockets
of green buccaneers, the parrot fish floating
from the frayed shoulders of pirates, sea horses
drawing gowned ladies in their liquid promenade
across the moss-green meadows of the sea;
he heard the drowned choirs under Palisadoes,
a hymn ascending to earth from a heaven inverted
by water, a crab climbing the steeple,
and he climbed from that submarine kingdom
as the evening lights came on in the institute,
the scholars lamplit in their own aquarium,
he saw them mouthing like parrot fish, as he passed
upward from that baptism, their history lessons,
the bubbles like ideas which he could not break:
Jamaica was captured by Penn and Venables,
Port Royal perished in a cataclysmic earthquake."

[Breña · Rating 3 out of 5]

"Dies ist mein Meer, aber es spricht eine andere Sprache, seine Aussprache wechselt von Insel zu Insel."

Gedichte eines Nobelpreisträgers, eigentlich nicht mein bevorzugtes Lesematerial. Walcott empfinde ich zumindest als lesbar und in gewisser Weise sogar als zeitlos. Er verknüpft Geschichte und Kultur seiner karibischen Heimat mit Eindrücken und kulturellen Wurzeln Europas und Nordamerikas. Dabei fokussiert er sich oft auf Orte, was mir das Lesen erleichterte, selbst wenn er Personen referenziert. Sowieso lesen sich seine langen Gedichte mit eigenem Rhythmus ganz gut.
Viele Hintergründe und Zusammenhänge erschließen sich mir nicht, was ok ist, einige kann ich hingegen einordnen oder zumindest zuordnen. Insgesamt fühle ich mich jedoch zu sehr an Gedichtinterpretationen aus Schulzeiten erinnert. ;)

Vor- und Nachwort habe ich nur angelesen, beides wirkte sehr verkopft-schwurbelig...

"Die Boulevards öffnen sich wie Romane, die noch zu schreiben sind."

[M.W.P.M. · Rating 4 out of 5]

In idle August, while the sea soft,
and leaves of brown islands stick to the rim
of this Caribbean, I blow out the light
by the dreamless face of Maria Concepcion
to ship as a seaman on the schooner Flight.
Out in the yard turning gray in the dawn,
I stood like a stone and nothing else move
but the cold sea rippling like galvanize
and the nail holes of stars in the sky roof,
till a wind start to interfere with the trees.
I pass me dry neighbor sweeping she yard
as I went downhill, and I nearly said:
“Sweep soft, you witch, ’cause she don’t sleep hard,”
but the bitch look through me like I was dead.
A route taxi pull up, park-lights still on.
The driver size up my bags with a grin:
“This time, Shabine, like you really gone!”
I ain’t answer the ass, I simply pile in
the back seat and watch the sky burn
above Laventille pink as the gown
in which the woman I left was sleeping,
and I look in the rearview and see a man
exactly like me, and the man was weeping
for the houses, the streets, that whole fucking island.

Christ have mercy on all sleeping things!
From that dog rotting down Wrightson Road
to when I was a dog on these streets;
if loving these islands must be my load,
out of corruption my soul takes wings.
But they had started to poison my soul
with their big house, big car, big-time bohbohl,
coolie, nigger, Syrian, and French Creole,
so I leave it for them and their carnival—
I taking a sea bath, I gone down the road.
I know these islands from Monos to Nassau,
a rusty head sailor with sea-green eyes
that they nickname Shabine, the patois for
any red nigger, and I, Shabine, saw
when these slums of empire was paradise.
I’m just a red nigger who love the sea,
I had a sound colonial education,
I have Dutch, nigger, and English in me,
and either I’m nobody, or I’m a nation,

But Maria Concepcion was all my thought
watching the sea heaving up and down
as the port side of dories, schooners, and yachts
was painted afresh by the strokes of the sun
signing her name with every reflection;
I knew 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,
so I smile to myself as the bow rope untied
and the Flight swing seaward: “Is no use repeating
that the sea have more fish. I ain’t want her
dressed in the sexless light of a seraph,
I want those round brown eyes like a marmoset, and
till the day when I can lean back and laugh,
those claws that tickled my back on sweating
Sunday afternoons, like a crab on wet sand.”
As I worked, watching the rotting waves come
past the bow that scissor the sea like silk,
I swear to you all, by my mother’s milk,
by the stars that shall fly from tonight’s furnace,
that I loved them, my children, my wife, my home;
I loved them as poets love the poetry
that kills them, as drowned sailors the sea.

You ever look up from some lonely beach
and see a far schooner? Well, when I write
this poem, each phrase go be soaked in salt;
I go draw and knot every line as tight
as ropes in this rigging; in simple speech
my common language go be the wind,
my pages the sails of the schooner Flight.
But let me tell you how this business begin.

- The Schooner Flight, I. Adios, Carenage, pg. 3-5

* * *

As for that other thing
which comes when the eyelid is glazed
and the wax gleam
from the unwrinkled forehead
asks no more questions
of the dry mouth,

whether they open the heart like a shirt
to release a rage of swallows,
whether the brain
is a library for worms,
on the instant of that knowledge
of the moment
when everything became so stiff,

so formal with ironical adieux,
organ and choir,
and I must borrow a black tie,
and at what moment in the oration
shall I break down and weep -
there was the startle of wings
breaking from the closing cage
of your body, your fist unclenching
these pigeons circling serenely
over the page,

and,
as the parentheses lock like a gate
1917 to 1977,
the semicircles close to form a face,
a world, a wholeness,
an unbreakable O,
and something that once had a fearful name
walks from the thing that used to wear its name,
transparent, exact representative,
so that we can see through it
churches, cars, sunlight,
and the Boston Common,
not needing any book.

- R.T.S.L., pg. 36-37

* * *

There were still shards of an ancient pastoral
in those shires of the island where the cattle drank
their pools of shadow from an older sky,
surviving from when the landscape copied such objects as
'Herefords at Sunset in the valley of the Wye.'
The mountain water that fell white from the mill wheel
sprinkling like petals from the star-apple trees,
and all of the windmills and sugar mills moved by mules
on the treadmill of Monday to Monday, would repeat
in tongues of water and wind and fire, in tongues
of Mission School pickaninnies, like rivers remembering
their source, Parish Trelawny, Parish St David, Parish
St Andrew, the names afflicting the pastures,
the lime groves and fences of marl stone and the cattle
with a docile longing, an epochal content.
And there were, like old wedding lace in an attic,
among the boas and parasols and the tea-colored
daguerreotypes, hints of an epochal happiness
as ordered and infinite to the child
as the great house road to the Great House
down a perspective of casuarinas plunging green manes
in time to the horses, an orderly life
reduced by lorgnettes day and night, one disc the sun,
the other the moon, reduced into a pier glass:
nannies diminished to dolls, mahogany stairways
no larger than those of an album in which
the flash of cutlery yellows, as gamboge as
the piled cakes of teatime on that latticed
bougainvillea verandah that looked down toward
a prospect of Cuyp-like Herefords under a sky
lurid as a porcelain souvenir with these words:
'Herefords at Sunset in the Valley of the Wye.'

Strange, that the rancor of hatred hid in that dream
of slow rivers and lily-like parasols, in snaps
of fine old colonial families, curled at the edge
not from age of from fire or the chemicals, no, not at all,
but because, off at its edges, innocently excluded
stood the groom, the cattle boy, the housemaid, the gardeners,
the tenants, the good Negroes down in the village,
their mouth in the locked jaw of a silent scream.
A scream which would open the doors to swing wildly
all night, that was bringing in heavier clouds,
more black smoke than cloud, frightening the cattle
in whose bulging eyes the Great House diminished;
a scorching wind of a scream
that began to extinguish the fireflies,
that dried the water mill creaking to a stop
as it was about to pronounce Parish Trelawny
all over, in the ancient pastoral voice,
a wind that blew all without bending anything,
neither the leaves of the album nor the lime groves;
blew Nanny floating back in white from a feather
to a chimerical, chemical pin speck that shrank
the drinking Herefords to brown porcelain cows
on a mantelpiece, Trelawny trembling with dusk,
the scorched pastures of the old benign Custos; blew
far the decent servants and the lifelong cook,
and shriveled to a shard that ancient pastoral
of dusk in a gilt-edged frame now catching the evening sun
in Jamaica, making both epochs one.

He looked out from the Great House windows on
clouds that still held the fragrance of fire,
he saw the Botanical Gardens officially drown
in a formal dusk, where governors had strolled
and black gardeners had smiled over glinting shears
at the lilies of parasols on the floating lawns,
the flame trees obeyed his will and lowered their wicks,
the flowers tightened their fists in the name of thrift,
the porcelain lamps of ripe cocoa, the magnolia's jet
dimmed on the one circuit with the ginger lilies
and left a lonely bulb on the verandah,
and, had his mandate extended to that ceiling
of star-apple candelabra, he would have ordered
the sky to sleep, saying, I'm tired,
save the starlight for victories, we can't afford it,
leave the moon on for one more hour,and that's it.
But though his power, the given mandate, extended
from tangerine daybreaks to star-apple dusks,
his hand could not dam that ceaseless torrent of dust
that carried the shacks of the poor, to their root-rock music,
down the gullies of Yallahs and August Town,
to lodge them on thorns of maca, with their rags
crucified by cactus, tins, old tires, cartons;
from the black Warieka Hills the sky glowed fierce as
the dials of a million radios,
a throbbing sunset that glowed like a grid
where the dread beat rose from the jukebox of Kingston.
He saw the fountains dried of quadrilles, the water-music
of the country dancers, the fiddlers like fifes
put aside. He had to heal
this malarial island in its bath of bay leaves,
its forests tossing with fever, the dry cattle
groaning like winches, the grass that kept shaking
its head to remember its name. No vowels left
in the mill wheel, the river. Rock stone. Rock stone.

The mountains rolled like whales through phosphorous stars,
as he swayed like a stone down fathoms into sleep,
drawn by that magnet which pulls down half the world
between a star and a star, by that black power
that has the assassin dreaming of snow,
that poleaxes the tyrant to a sleeping child.
The house is rocking at anchor, but as he falls
his mind is a mill wheel in moonlight,
and he hears, in the sleep of his moonlight, the drowned
bell of Port Royal's cathedral, sees the copper pennies
of bubbles rising from the empty eye-pockets
of green buccaneers, the parrot fish floating
from the frayed shoulders of pirates, sea horses
drawing gowned ladies in their liquid promenade
across the moss-green meadows of the sea;
he heard the drowned choirs under Palisadoes,
a hymn ascending to earth from a heaven inverted
by water, a crab climbing the steeple,
and he climbed from that submarine kingdom
as the evening lights came on in the institute,
the scholars lamplit in their own aquarium,
he saw them mouthing like parrot fish, as he passed
upward from that baptism, their history lessons,
the bubbles like ideas which he could not break:
Jamaica was captured by Penn and Venables,
Port Royal perished in a cataclysmic earthquake.

Before the coruscating façades of cathedrals
from Santiago to Caracas, where penitential archbishops
washed the feet of paupers (a parenthetical moment
that made the Caribbean a baptismal font,
turned butterflies to stone, and whitened like doves
the buzzards circling municipal garbage),
the Caribbean was borne like an elliptical basin
in the hands of acolytes, and a people were absolved
of a history which they did not commit;
the slave pardoned his whip, and the dispossessed
said the rosary of islands for three hundred years,
a hymn that resounded like the hum of the sea
inside a sea cave, as their knees turned to stone,
while the bodies of patriots were melting down walls
still crusted with mute outcries of La Revolucion!
'San Salvador, pray for us,St. Thomas, San Domingo,
ora pro nobis, intercede for us, Sancta Lucia
of no eyes,' and when the circular chaplet
reached the last black bead of Sancta Trinidad
they began again, their knees drilled into stone,
where Colon had begun, with San Salvador's bead,
beads of black colonies round the necks of Indians.
And while they prayed for an economic miracle,
ulcers formed on the municipal portraits,
the hotels went up, and the casinos and brothels,
and the empires of tobacco, sugar, and bananas,
until a black woman, shawled like a buzzard,
climbed up the stairs and knocked at the door
of his dream, whispering in the ear of the keyhole:
'Let me in, I'm finished with praying, I'm the Revolution.
I am the darker, the older America.'

She was as beautiful as a stone in the sunrise,
her voice had the gutturals of machine guns
across khaki deserts where the cactus flower
detonates like grenades, her sex was the slit throat
of an Indian, her hair had the blue-black sheen of the crow.
She was a black umbrella blown inside out
by the wind of revolution, La Madre Dolorosa,
a black rose of sorrow, a black mine of silence,
raped wife, empty mother, Aztec virgin
transfixed by arrows from a thousand guitars,
a stone full of silence, which, if it gave tongue
to the tortures done in the name of the Father,
would curdle the blood of the marauding wolf,
the fountain of generals, poets, and cripples
who danced without moving over their graves
with each revolution; her Caesarean was stitched
by the teeth of machine guns,and every sunset
she carried the Caribbean's elliptical basin
as she had once carried the penitential napkins
to be the footbath of dictators, Trujillo, Machado,
and those whose faces had yellowed like posters
on municipal walls. Now she stroked his hair
until it turned white, but she would not understand
that he wanted no other power but peace,
that he wanted a revolution without any bloodshed,
he wanted a history without any memory,
streets without statues,
and a geography without myth. He wanted no armies
but those regiments of bananas, thick lances of cane,
and he sobbed,'I am powerless, except for love.'
She faded from him, because he could not kill;
she shrunk to a bat that hung day and night
in the back of his brain. He rose in his dream.
[...]

- The Star-Apple Kingdom, pg. 46-52

[Isaac Timm · Rating 5 out of 5]

Two of my favorite Walcott poems in this collection: "The Schooner Flight" and "The Sea is History"

[Melissa · Rating 5 out of 5]

Las descripciones poéticas de Walcott de los paisajes del Caribe junto a toda su complejidad de historia/identidad, son de las que más me he sentido conectada. Cuando leia los poemas, estaba totalmente impresionada como Walcott logra hacer una anatomía de lo que compone las sensaciones sobre un paisaje en específico y utilizarlo como recurso para agregar a la atmósfera de emociones alrededor de las historia. Lo lindo es que estos paisajes, esos momentos, se sienten muy cercanos. Puedo decir que es mis autores favoritos.

[Jeff · Rating 4 out of 5]

Through the clear, water-color words of Walcott, the reader feels the socio-mythological cultural identities of being Caribbean resonate and ring in the rhythm and rhyme of each stanza and line. His poetry takes us beyond an intellectual understanding of a place or a people to a heartfelt knowing.

Each sentence simple, but full of depth.

I met Derek Walcott in 1982 and enjoyed a conversation with him about the cultural necessity and power of poetry.

[Elizabeth Branstetter · Rating 5 out of 5]

Walcott is truly a visionary. His treatment of History with all of her reverence is perfectly balanced with the gravity of the contemporary. Walcott’s work hold entire seas of language, of culture, of context, all illustrated with the epic treatment of journeys and discovery. Walcott is a wordsmith, a weaver of legend, a true Poet.

[Emily Ruth · Rating 5 out of 5]

"The Sea is History"...Mr. Wolcott's writing takes my breath away.

[andré crombie · Rating 5 out of 5]

“There were still shards of an ancient pastoral
in those shires of the island where the cattle drank”

Notes: Five stars for the titular poem alone. Just staggering.

[Cooch · Rating 5 out of 5]

An excellent collection.

There are many moments of lyrical genius in this collection. Walcott's poems sing. He is one of the 20th Century's greatest poets.

[Eric Boles · Rating 4 out of 5]

I wept under water, salt seeking salt, / for her beauty had fallen on me like a sword

[Sameen Shakya · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Star-Apple Kingdom is a poetry collection by Novel prize winning Saint Lucian poet Derek Walcott. Walcott is largely seen as one of the most prominent poets hailing from the Caribbean. I've long wanted to read a full body of work by him after having only tasted his works via short poems found online.

This collection was a worthy introduction. It is short and punchy. The poems largely have to do with the Caribbean and reading them feels like taking a mythic trip through that beautiful land.

I loved reading this book and the poems therein.

[✨ Anna ✨ | ReadAllNight · Rating 5 out of 5]

Amazing. Have paperback edition.

[Hannah · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lovely poems. Walcott's talent in writing in particular voices, in capturing the strange and ethereal and difficult nature of reality and history and the world around us, is clear and satisfying.