How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.Section.Page)
Quote #1
The sore on his shin/still unhealed, like a radiant anemone. It had come/from a scraping, rusted anchor. The pronged iron/peeled the skin in a backwash. (II.i.9-10)
This is the first and most literal explanation of Philoctete's wound—but it is doesn't get to the true nature of the festering sore. You might be thinking that he's got a nice case of tetanus, but you'd be at least partly wrong. Philoctete's wound cannot be healed because of its deeper connections to the sufferings of his enslaved ancestors on the island.
Quote #2
His skin was a nettle,/his head a market of ants; he heard the crabs groan/from arthritic pincers, he felt a mole-cricket drill/his sore to the bone. His knee was radiant iron,/his chest was a sack of ice, and behind the bars/of his rusted teeth, like a mongoose in a cage,/a scream was mad to come out (IV.i.21)
Philoctete's suffering is wicked serious. It's not just that he's had the bad luck to scrape his leg on a submerged anchor; he's also enduring the physical tolls of poverty and the psychological weight of his entire race. Ouch.
Quote #3
This wound I have stitched into Plunkett's character./He has to be wounded, affliction is one theme/of this work, this fiction, since every "I" is a/fiction finally. (V.ii.28)
Walcott is not shy about speaking directly to his audience about his methods in this work. He tells us straight-up that he's interested in suffering and that he's creating entire characters who will explore pain and find ways to endure. Walcott also gives us a glimpse of his thoughts on the first-person narrator. Is he a fictional character? Is he Walcott the real, live poet? Yes to both, since all representations of the self are fictional.
Quote #4
Tears prickled his eyes. Maud reached across the saucer/and gripped his fingers. He knew she could see inside the wound in his head. His white nurse. His officer. (V.i.27)
Major Plunkett thinks back to his military service and begins to ask what it was all for. As he relives the past, he is overwhelmed with emotion. Both he and Maud refer to his trauma as the "wound in his head," and it very well could be a physical wound that gives him trouble. But in this passage and others, there are indications that Major Plunkett suffers from PTSD.
Quote #5
"Hell was built on those hills. In that country of coal/without fire, that inferno the same colour/as their skins and shadows, every labouring soul/climbed with her hundredweight basket, every load for/one copper penny, balanced erect on their necks/that were tight as the liner's hawsers from the weight." (XIII.ii.74)
The narrator's ghost-father shows him the women of the past who used to haul huge baskets of coal to feed the needs of those who exploited the island for their own financial gain. The work, as we can see here, is little better than slavery, requiring supreme strength and endurance for very little return. Warwick will tell the narrator that it is his duty to memorialize this struggle in his poetry… No pressure, son.
Quote #6
He saw how she wished/for a peace beyond her beauty, past the tireless/quarrel over a face that was not her own fault/any more than the full moon's grace sailing dark trees,/and for that moment Achille was angrily filled/with a pity beyond his own pain. (XXI.iii.115)
Achille steps away from his own emotions and perceives Helen as she truly is: suffering because of her own beauty. Though he has just insulted her for her behavior, this flash of insight allows him to see that she is, at least in part, not to blame (she didn't ask to be beautiful).
Quote #7
He believed he smelt as badly as Philoctete/from the rotting loneliness that drew every glance/away from him, as stale as a drying fishnet. (XXII.i.116)
After Helen leaves, Achille isolates himself from the other fishermen. His depression demands solitude, but he also feels that he is somehow a marked man now, and that others won't want to be near him. The language here is of decay and disrepair, as though Achille is now both broken and discarded.
Quote #8
Achille saw the ghost/of his father's face shoot up at the end of the line./Achille stared in pious horror at the bound canvas/and could not look away, or loosen its burial knots./Then, for the first time, he asked himself who he was. (XXIV.11.130)
In the throes of sunstroke, Achille hallucinates that the floating, white canvas is really his dead father trussed up for burial. The vision makes him question his identity and sends him on a trip to Africa in order to find his true name.
Quote #9
He foresaw their future. He knew nothing could change it./The tinkle from coins of the river, the tinkle of irons./The son's grief was the father's, the father's his son's. (XXVII.ii.146)
Achille desperately plans to ambush the raiders who have taken his people away from the village in chains in order to sell them into slavery. While he feels that he can save them from all the suffering to come, there's a sense of inevitably about the situation that overrides Achille's determination.
Quote #10
And then Achille died/again. Thinking of the ants arriving at the sea's rim,/or climbing the pyramids of coal and entering inside/the dark hold, far from this river and the griot's hymn. (XXVII.ii.146)
As he watches his people being led away in chains, Achille's despair is acute. He knows the horrors that await them and would do anything to prevent it—but he can't change the course of history.
Quote #11
They had wept, not for/their wives only, their fading children, but for strange,/ordinary things. This one, who was a hunter,/wept for a sapling lance whose absent heft sang/in his palm's hollow. One, a fisherman, for an ochre/river encircling his calves (XXVIII.iii.151)
This is the Middle Passage, where enslaved Africans were split from their tribes and families and imprisoned in the holds of a slave ship. The pain they feel, Walcott points out, comes from the loss of a life to which they can never return.
Quote #12
I was as old as her/exhausted prayer, as her wisps of memory floated/with a vague patience, telling her body: "Wait,"/when all that brightness had withered like a memory's flower, like the allamanda's bells and the pale lilac/bougainvillea vines that had covered our gabled house./They, like her natural memory, would not come back. (XXXII.i.166)
When the narrator visits his mother in a nursing home, he reflects on the cruelty of dementia, which leaves the body fine but eats away at the memory and intellect. The moments of clarity that she experiences are sad reminders of the life she's left behind—though she's still alive.
Quote #13
When one grief afflicts us we choose a sharper grief/in hope that enormity will ease affliction,/so Catherine Weldon rose in high relief/through the thin page of a cloud, making a fiction/of my own loss. (XXXV.iii.181)
The narrator seeks solace in the grief of others—in this case, the plight of Catherine Weldon and the Plains Indians—but not because he's sadistic. By reading Weldon's story, the narrator is so completely taken up by the tragedy of another lost culture that his own loss pales in comparison.
Quote #14
[…] for the road-warrior/had paused in the smoke, not for Omeros's gods/nor the masks of his origins, the god-river,/the god-snake, but for the One that had gathered his race/in the shoal of a net, a confirmed believer/in his own hell, that his spectre's punishment was/a halt in its passage towards a smokeless place. (LVIII.ii.292)
To the narrator's surprise (and ours), he encounters Hector in hell. He's not suffering in the pit because he was a particularly bad guy; Hector made a serious mistake in choosing to believe in the god of the colonialists. Walcott's not so much saying that Christianity is bad as he is that Hector has to suffer in the place designated by his adopted religion. Perhaps he's also suffering there because he was a "traitor" to his ancestral spiritual beliefs.