How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.Section.Page)
Quote #1
But if I could read between the lines of her floor/like a white-hot deck uncaulked by Antillean heat,/to the shadows in its hold, its nostrils might flare/at the stench from manacled ankles, the coffled feet/scraping like leaves, and perhaps the inculpable marble/would have turned its white seeds away, to widen/the bow of its mouth at the horror under the table […] to do what the past always does: suffer, and stare. (II.ii.15)
The narrator begins this section by mapping the sea and geography of St. Lucia onto his lover's body. Ooh la la, we know. He contemplates the creepy bust of Homer in her apartment and makes the connection between the heroic past and the past of his people, which is dominated by captivity and slavery.
Quote #2
He believed the swelling came from the chained ankles/of his grandfathers. Or else why was there no cure?/That the cross he carried was not only the anchor's/but that of his race, for a village black and poor/as the pigs that rooted in its burning garbage,/then were hooked on the anchors of the abattoir. (III.iii.19)
Philoctete's incurable shin-sore forces him to look for deeper causes of the pain than simply a random, rusty anchor. His wound is both spiritual and physical, and stems from his poverty and marginalization on the island.
Quote #3
Helen needed a history,/that was the pity that Plunkett felt towards her./Not his, but her story. Not theirs, but Helen's war. (V.iii.30)
Major Plunkett channels his complex feelings toward Helen into a desire to "help" her by creating a recognized history of the island. But this isn't an impartial history—nope, he wants it to show the world why the major powers of the world would fight for Helen (both woman and island).
Quote #4
[…] as Lawrence came staggering up the terrace/with the cheque finally, and that treaty was signed;/the paper was crossed by the shadow of her face/as it was at Versailles, two centuries before,/by the shade of Admiral Rodney's gathering force;/a lion-headed island remembering war (V.iii.32)
Walcott takes the opportunity to show that one action or object can evoke memories or associations with larger moments in history. In this case, simply signing a credit card slip transports his mind to other signatures with greater consequences for the island.
Quote #5
A battle broke/out. Lances of sunlight hurled themselves into the sand,/the horse hardened to wood, Troy burned, and a soundless/wrestling of smoke-plumed warriors was spun/from the blowing veils, while she dangled her sandals/and passed through that door of black smoke into the sun. (VI.ii.35)
Remember that we are functioning on two levels in this scene. In the present, Helen is walking down the beach on St. Lucia, passing a boy on a horse and walking through the smoky air. But in the narrator's literary memory, he sees that other Helen moving through the ancient battle outside of Troy. He will speak later of how he cannot disassociate these two Helens and wonders why he can't just see a girl walking down a beach carrying her plastic sandals.
Quote #6
"They walk, you write;/keep to that narrow causeway without looking down,/climbing in their footsteps, that slow, ancestral beat/of those used to climbing roads; your own work owes them/because the couplet of those multiplying feet/made your first rhymes. Look, they climb, and no one knows them;/they take their copper pittances, and your duty/from the time you watched them from your grandmother's house/as a child wounded by their power and beauty is the chance you now have, to give those feet a voice." (XIII.iii.75-76)
Warwick tells his son that as a poet, he has a duty toward history to bear witness to the suffering and work of his ancestors. Note the double meaning of the phrase "couplet of those multiplying feet"—there's poetry in the steps of these women.
Quote #7
"Was the greatest battle/in naval history, which put the French to rout,/fought for a creature with a disposable tail/and elbows like a goalie? For this a redoubt/was built? And countrymen died? For a lizard/with an Aruac name? It will be rewritten/by black pamphleteers, History will be revised,/and we'll be its villains, fading from the map/...And when it's over/we'll be the bastards!" (XVII.i.92)
Major Plunkett has, perhaps, gotten just a little too much sun in his re-tracing of the battle throughout the island (hint: he's fighting with a lizard). His rant shows bitterness toward history: Who decides what is written? And who decides which people/nation was in the right? Major Plunkett knows the British are likely to come out as the bad guys—and in his heart, he knows that's probably fair—and yet, he loves the island and is British. He's in a frustrating position.
Quote #8
He had no idea how time could be reworded,/which is the historian's task. The factual fiction/of textbooks, pamphlets, brochures, which he had loaded/in a ziggurat from the library, had the affliction/of impartiality; skirting emotion/as a ship avoids a reef (XVIII.i.95)
Major Plunkett once again asks the big questions about the recording of history. He finds it difficult to approach his history of the island with impartiality, because he feels such passion for its beauty (think: Helen the island and Helen the woman). In the end, he realizes that such impartiality is a fiction—historians might "skirt" emotions, but they are the ones who focus historical memory.
Quote #9
Smoke wrote the same story/since the dawn of time. Smoke was time burning. It snaked/itself into a cloud, the wrinkled almond trees/grew older, but lovely, the dry leaves were baked like clay in a kiln. Their brightness was a disease like the golden dwarf-coconuts. It was the same/every drought. (XXII.ii.122)
We've seen how quickly smoke can transport Walcott from an ordinary day on the beach to the ancient shores of Troy and the destruction of a race. In this case, he sees smoke as a kind of vehicle for natural memory—the burning of leaves and rising of smoke are indications of seasons moving and time passing, and of life passing from one stage into the next.
Quote #10
Out of the depths of his ritual/baptism something was rising, some white memory/of a midshipman coming up close to the hull,/a white turning body, and this water go fill/with them, turning tied canvases, not sharks, but all/corpses wrapped like the sail, and ice-sweating Achille/in the stasis of his sunstroke looked as each swell/disgorged them, in tens, in hundreds, and his soul/sickened and was ill. (XXIV.ii.129)
Achille is just entering his sun stroke-induced hallucinations at sea. As he bathes the white sail in the ocean, he riffs on his earlier observations that many people died of drowning right under his boat. The whiteness of the sail is echoed in the whiteness of Midshipman Plunkett and his memory.
Quote #11
Time is the metre, memory the only plot./His shoulders are knobs of ebony. The back muscles/can bulge like porpoises leaping out of this line/from the gorge of our memory. (XXIV.ii.129)
We're not going to attempt to parse this one out completely, but we will point out that Walcott's vision of history here is mediated by his poetic vision. Also note that Achille's body is not just working the lines of the boat—it is actively pulling on the chords of history to "disgorge" a cultural memory that has been lost to Achille over generations. In about two seconds, he's going on a spirit-journey to his ancestors' settlement in Africa.
Quote #12
He saw the first signs of men, tall sapling fishing-stakes;/he came into his own beginning and his end,/for the swiftness of a second is all that memory takes./Now the strange, inimical river surrenders its stealth/to the sunlight. And a light inside him wakes,/skipping centuries, ocean and river, and Time itself. (XXV.i.134)
Achille has slipped through the space-time continuum to sail down the tributaries of the Congo and make it back to the settlement of his ancestors. That "light inside him" is an understanding of his true identity that is about to get larger as he journeys onward.
Quote #13
And the one thought thudding in him was, I can deliver/all of them by hiding in a half-circle, then I could/change their whole future, even the course of the river/would flow backwards, past the mangroves. (XXVII.iii.148)
Achille thinks he's being given the chance that we'd all kill for: the opportunity to change the atrocities of the past. But he learns that you just can't make the River of Time flow backward (pesky river).
Quote #14
Art is History's nostalgia, it prefers a thatched/roof to a concrete factory, and the huge church/above a bleached village. (XLV.ii.228)
When the narrator returns to St. Lucia, he reflects on the selfishness of the poet's gaze. He admits that he wants the island to stay undeveloped—not to preserve cultural integrity, but to inspire his poetic endeavors. The larger indictment here is of art, which prefers the idyllic to the reality of existence. Hey, reality can be hard…
Quote #15
All the pain/re-entered Philoctete, of the hacked yams, the hold/closing over their heads, the bolt-closing iron,/over eyes that never saw the light of this world,/their memory still there although all the pain was gone. (LV.iii.277)
Philoctete has already been healed of that smelly wound, but there's still a deep spiritual pain that wells up when he dances the paille-banane with Achille on Boxing Day. The more he remembers the suffering of his ancestors, the fresher the wound becomes. No rest for the weary, yo.
Quote #16
His memories opened the shutters of mimosa/like the lilies that widened in her pond at night/secretly, like angels, in faith that was hers. (LXI.iii.309)
Major Plunkett heals slowly from a variety of things: the loss of a son, the wounds inflicted by war, and the loss of his wife, Maud. In some sense, his healing comes about by perceiving things the way that Maud perhaps did. Note that Walcott suddenly uses floral images to describe the memories of a military man—it's clear that our character is reflecting on his life and looking more closely at life with his wife than he ever did before this.