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Midsummer
The poems in this sequence of fifty-four were written to encompass one year, from summer to summer. Their principal themes are the stasis, both stultifying and provocative, of midsummer in the tropics; the pull of the sea, family, and friendship on one whose circumstances lead to separation; the relationship of poetry to painting; and the place of a poet between two cultures.Walcott records, with his distinctive linguistic blend of soaring imagery and plainly stated facts, the experience of a mid-life period--in reality and in memory or the imagination. As Louis Simpson wrote on the publication of Wacott's The Fortunate Traveller, "Walcott is a spellbinder. Of how many poets can it be said that their poems are compelling--not a mere stringing together of images and ideas but language that delights in itself, rhythms that seem spontaneous, scenes that are vividly there?...The poet who can write like this is a master."
- GenresPoetry
72 pages, Paperback
First published July 23, 1984
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263 people want to read
About the author
Derek Walcott
159books491followersDerek 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.
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.
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Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews
May 12, 2022
A grand old friend, the poet Everett Hoagland, gifted me a signed copy of this dense and compact collection of Walcott’s poems published separately in the New Yorker, The Harvard Advocate, The New York Review of Books, and The NYT Book Review� the NYT had also published my “On Language� column in the Magazine (Aug 1987).
From stage fright I have lost my voice twice in my life. Once, aged 9 on stage in a Christmas pageant at Birchland Park grade school and Jr. H.S., I froze and whispered a memorized passage from Luke. Second, as a community college prof when I brought my already-read copy of Omeros to Walcott to sign, at a conference near Portsmouth, N.H. As I handed the seated author his book, I tried to quote his penultimate line, “The full Moon shone like a slice of raw onion.� Nothing issued from my mouth, so impressed had I been with Walcott’s story, his many languages (though I have five), and his writing. I had earlier at the conference spoken on bilingualism; I had claimed a second language always a second language, until that very day when I heard Walcott slip into French, maybe Spanish or Dutch, and a couple of creoles.
I find Midsummer much more difficult to read than Omeros (as of posting, still haven't finished the 54 pp), and impossible to memorize. But he does have another good moon line, “The moon shone like a lost button�(vii). Some difficulty arrives from the hasty multitude of his metaphors and similes, “A long …cloud, like a cleared linen table,/makes heaven emptier, like after-dinner Sundays�(xxi). His plenitude of locatives may also stymie, despite leading on a great line,
“What roars in the throat of the oaks is martial man,
the marching hosannas darken the wheat of Russia,
the coiled ram hides in the rocks of Afghanistan…�(xxii).
Walcott left home at eighteen to paint, following his deceased father’s skills. Here we find two stanzas to Gaugin—if they are stanzas, as from Pushkin’s Yevgeni Onyegin—and one to Watteau, as well as mentions of his Dutch forbears and Vermeer, von Ruysdael.
“I once brushed a drop of water from a Flemish still life
in a book of prints, believing it was real�(xvii).
Raised Methodist, at fourteen his religious poem in the newspaper The Voice of St. Lucia, had been condemned in print by a Catholic priest; at nineteen, his teacher and seamstress widowed mom had paid $200 for the publication of two small books of poetry, which the boy hand-sold and returned the money for Epitaph for the Young (1949). He attended university in Kingston, Jamaica, moved to Trinidad and founded the Trinidad Theatre Workshop also in 1949.
Twenty years later his play was produced on NBC-TV in NYC. Boston University hired him to teach, and he founded Boston Theatre Workshop in 1981. OBE and Nobel Prizes followed, as did friendships with Boston-based poets, the Russian Brodsky and the Irish Seamus Heaney (whom I’ve also heard read in Boston).
By the way, the Nobel awards often get it wrong, as when they gave the French fellow-Caribbean St Jean Perse the award over the best American poet of the 20th Century, Robert Frost. Probably also with Bob Dylan/ Zimmerman, when the Beatles’s poems/songs are better, tectonically ironic. But with Naipaul and Walcott, okay.
From stage fright I have lost my voice twice in my life. Once, aged 9 on stage in a Christmas pageant at Birchland Park grade school and Jr. H.S., I froze and whispered a memorized passage from Luke. Second, as a community college prof when I brought my already-read copy of Omeros to Walcott to sign, at a conference near Portsmouth, N.H. As I handed the seated author his book, I tried to quote his penultimate line, “The full Moon shone like a slice of raw onion.� Nothing issued from my mouth, so impressed had I been with Walcott’s story, his many languages (though I have five), and his writing. I had earlier at the conference spoken on bilingualism; I had claimed a second language always a second language, until that very day when I heard Walcott slip into French, maybe Spanish or Dutch, and a couple of creoles.
I find Midsummer much more difficult to read than Omeros (as of posting, still haven't finished the 54 pp), and impossible to memorize. But he does have another good moon line, “The moon shone like a lost button�(vii). Some difficulty arrives from the hasty multitude of his metaphors and similes, “A long …cloud, like a cleared linen table,/makes heaven emptier, like after-dinner Sundays�(xxi). His plenitude of locatives may also stymie, despite leading on a great line,
“What roars in the throat of the oaks is martial man,
the marching hosannas darken the wheat of Russia,
the coiled ram hides in the rocks of Afghanistan…�(xxii).
Walcott left home at eighteen to paint, following his deceased father’s skills. Here we find two stanzas to Gaugin—if they are stanzas, as from Pushkin’s Yevgeni Onyegin—and one to Watteau, as well as mentions of his Dutch forbears and Vermeer, von Ruysdael.
“I once brushed a drop of water from a Flemish still life
in a book of prints, believing it was real�(xvii).
Raised Methodist, at fourteen his religious poem in the newspaper The Voice of St. Lucia, had been condemned in print by a Catholic priest; at nineteen, his teacher and seamstress widowed mom had paid $200 for the publication of two small books of poetry, which the boy hand-sold and returned the money for Epitaph for the Young (1949). He attended university in Kingston, Jamaica, moved to Trinidad and founded the Trinidad Theatre Workshop also in 1949.
Twenty years later his play was produced on NBC-TV in NYC. Boston University hired him to teach, and he founded Boston Theatre Workshop in 1981. OBE and Nobel Prizes followed, as did friendships with Boston-based poets, the Russian Brodsky and the Irish Seamus Heaney (whom I’ve also heard read in Boston).
By the way, the Nobel awards often get it wrong, as when they gave the French fellow-Caribbean St Jean Perse the award over the best American poet of the 20th Century, Robert Frost. Probably also with Bob Dylan/ Zimmerman, when the Beatles’s poems/songs are better, tectonically ironic. But with Naipaul and Walcott, okay.
December 17, 2024
Derek Walcott� Prémio Nobel da Literatura, 1992
Por uma obra poética de grande luminosidade, sustentada numa visão histórica, o resultado de um compromisso multicultural
Derek Alton Walcott nasceu em Castries, Santa Lúcia, a 23 de janeiro de 1930.
Castries, Santa Lúcia
Formou-se em Francês, Latim e Espanhol na Universidade das Índias Ocidentais em 1953. Recebeu várias distinções, incluindo a Medalha da Rainha para a Poesia, o Prémio Nobel da Literatura e o Prémio T. S. Eliot pela sua coletânea de poesia White Egrets.
Derek Walcott faleceu a 17 de março de 2017.
Midsummer é uma coletânea de 54 poemas e foi um grande desafio. Há muitas referências, desde a natureza exuberante de Santa Lúcia aos efeitos do colonialismo, passando pela dualidade entre a cultura europeia e a caribenha, com elementos de cultura crioula.
Sinto que grande parte das referências me passou ao lado!
This drizzle that falls now is American rain,
stitching stars in the sand. My own corpuscles
are changing as fast. I fear what the migrant envies:
the starry pattern they make—the flag on the post office�
the quality of the dirt, the fealty changing under my foot.
84/198 � Santa Lucia
May 15, 2009
I pause to hear a racketing triumph of cicadas
setting life's pitch, but to live at their pitch
of joy is unendurable.
A stone house waits on the steps.
Perhaps if I'd nurtured some divine disease,
like Keats in eternal Rome, or Chekhov at Yalta,
something that sharpened the salt fragrance of sweat
with the lancing rib of my pen, my gift would increase,
as the hand of a cloud turning over the sea will alter
the sunlight--clouds smudged like silver plate,
leaves that keep trying to summarize my life.
setting life's pitch, but to live at their pitch
of joy is unendurable.
A stone house waits on the steps.
Perhaps if I'd nurtured some divine disease,
like Keats in eternal Rome, or Chekhov at Yalta,
something that sharpened the salt fragrance of sweat
with the lancing rib of my pen, my gift would increase,
as the hand of a cloud turning over the sea will alter
the sunlight--clouds smudged like silver plate,
leaves that keep trying to summarize my life.
January 29, 2022
It used to be that poetry intimidated me, until I learned to just keep reading and get what I could from the poems. In the case of 's , I feel more confident and, in fact, want to read more of his work. Hailing from Saint Lucia in the Caribbean, he is the winner of the 1992 Nobel Prize in Literature. Walcott's collection positively reeks of the sea, with side trips to Britain, New England, and even Ohio:
A storm has wrecked the island, the beach is a mess,I am sorry to hear that he died in 2017. Sometimes I wish that poets would live forever, as they just seem to get better with age.
a bent man, crouching, crosses it, cuffed by the wind;
from that gap of blue, with seraphic highmindedness,
the frigate birds are crying that foul weather lifts the soul,
that the sodden red rag of the heart, when it has dried,
will flutter like a lifeguard's flag from its rusty pole.
September 25, 2023
Read Around the World: St. Lucia
August 26, 2024
Haunting, beautiful, not a word wasted, not a drop spilt. Walcott has an incredible way of making language into something tangible, a physical thing that makes words in the world but also scrapes away at that world, upholding empire and injustice. The poems are also a stunning meditation on the natural world, and humans as fractured and distant from it.
October 20, 2021
“The heart is housebound in books—open your
leaves,
let light freckle the earth-colored earth, since
light is plenty to make do with. Midsummer bursts
out of its body, and its poems come unwarranted,
as when, hearing what sounds like rain, we startle a place
where a waterfall crashes down rocks. Abounding grace!�
Notes: Wow.
“No subtle fugues between black day, black night,
no grays, no subterfuge in this straight light.
A smoky, churning dark, shot with the white-hot pokers
of street lamps.�
Wow!
“So what shall we do for the dead, to whose conch-bordered
tumuli our lifelong attraction is drawn
as to a magnetic empire, whose cities lie ordered
with streets and rational avenues, exact as the grid
of our vibrating metropolis?�
Wow!!
“The amber spray of trees feather-brushed with the dusk,
the ruined cavity of some spectral château, the groin
of a leering satyr eaten with ivy. In the distance, the grain
of some unreapable, alchemical harvest, the hollow at
the heart of all embarkations. Nothing stays green
in that prodigious urging toward twilight;
in all of his journeys the pilgrims are in fever
from the tremulous strokes of malaria’s laureate.�
WOW.
leaves,
let light freckle the earth-colored earth, since
light is plenty to make do with. Midsummer bursts
out of its body, and its poems come unwarranted,
as when, hearing what sounds like rain, we startle a place
where a waterfall crashes down rocks. Abounding grace!�
Notes: Wow.
“No subtle fugues between black day, black night,
no grays, no subterfuge in this straight light.
A smoky, churning dark, shot with the white-hot pokers
of street lamps.�
Wow!
“So what shall we do for the dead, to whose conch-bordered
tumuli our lifelong attraction is drawn
as to a magnetic empire, whose cities lie ordered
with streets and rational avenues, exact as the grid
of our vibrating metropolis?�
Wow!!
“The amber spray of trees feather-brushed with the dusk,
the ruined cavity of some spectral château, the groin
of a leering satyr eaten with ivy. In the distance, the grain
of some unreapable, alchemical harvest, the hollow at
the heart of all embarkations. Nothing stays green
in that prodigious urging toward twilight;
in all of his journeys the pilgrims are in fever
from the tremulous strokes of malaria’s laureate.�
WOW.
July 19, 2017
Not his best work. Plodding, convoluted, low in rhyme, rare in wit. The page-long poems are scattered between Boston, England and the Caribbean - individually they are vaguely speculative and descriptive, collectively they are incoherent. The 8-page 'Tropic Zone' about Havana is the most extensive, coherent and interesting. But I only give this book 2 stars, at least on first reading. I suspect that if I reread it after a pause, I may find it better because Walcott is a good writer. But at his best he is far, far better than this.
September 28, 2020
Erudition. Heart. A language that transcends words but embraces the age of a complex world. Derek Walcott was a painter of words, of tones, of rhythms, of history, colonialism and mundanity. The epic of his verses and the fundamental lyricism of his poetic style make Walcott not only one of the most histrionic minds of the XX century, but the most versatile and rich in contents and language poet of his generation. Midsummer is an ode of extraordinary flexuous composition and an acute sense of history, society and time.
June 20, 2018
Very visual poetry
April 19, 2023
Beautiful
January 2, 2025
there is a period that occurs every 2-3 years or so, often in winter, where i just need to read walcott poems, even (or maybe especially) the ones that are more like picture postcards than verse
October 8, 2018
Derek Walcott's visions of island life are evocative and multidimensional, classical and post-colonial. Midsummer takes us through a variety of seasons and places, all backboned by the meaning of an island home. The mostly loose forms bounded by occasional rhyme give broad, often boundless tableaux with intricate detail.
But: how to process learning halfway through reading Midsummer, as I did, that Walcott was accused multiple times of sexual harassment by female students in the 1980s and 1990s? I feel like my disappointment in male artists is almost routine by now, followed by a weak urge to "separate the art and the artist" like we're always told. Walcott's perspective is a important one, but as brilliant article by Ariel Saramandi puts it, "He may have given us islanders a voice, but he did it with a hand pressed to women’s mouths." And for that reason, although I was often impressed by Walcott's brilliance, I'm not going to go out of my way to recommend his works. I'm sure there are many female Caribbean poets who deserve more of our attention than they have previously gotten.
But: how to process learning halfway through reading Midsummer, as I did, that Walcott was accused multiple times of sexual harassment by female students in the 1980s and 1990s? I feel like my disappointment in male artists is almost routine by now, followed by a weak urge to "separate the art and the artist" like we're always told. Walcott's perspective is a important one, but as brilliant article by Ariel Saramandi puts it, "He may have given us islanders a voice, but he did it with a hand pressed to women’s mouths." And for that reason, although I was often impressed by Walcott's brilliance, I'm not going to go out of my way to recommend his works. I'm sure there are many female Caribbean poets who deserve more of our attention than they have previously gotten.
May 31, 2015
For Walcott, there is no separation between poetry and religion and mud and race and God and the sun. There is poetry everywhere and everywhere is made of poetry: "note how the earth drinks/language as precious.../Then, on dank ground, using a twig for a pen,/write Genesis and watch the Word begin." The poems in this collection encompass a year in the life of the Earth, a year in the life of a year. They're beautiful throughout.
As I expected given what I'd previously read of him, Walcott's central interest is in identity---how it's made in the sparks of the stones of race and history and place and language banging against one another: "Since all of your work was really an effort to appease/the past.../you were distressed by your habitat, you shall not find peace/till you and your origins reconcile." Line like these are wonderful and plentiful.
It may be an issue of personal taste, but if the whole collection was concerned solely with the issues described above, I'd have grown bored. This is not the case here. Walcott is an extraordinary poet because everything he says is said extraordinarily…just as the order of the year provides the formal structure of this collection, each poem sees its speaker in a frantic, melancholic, hopeful, and proud rage for order. LISTEN to these lines "So what shall we do for the dead, to whose conch-bordered/tumuli our lifelong attraction is drawn/as to a magnetic empire. whose cities lie ordered with streets and rational avenues, exact as the grid/of our vibrating metropolis?/In our arrogance, we imagine/that they, too, share the immense, inaudible pulse of the clock-shaped earth.../Any peace so indifferent, where all our differences fuse,/is an insult to imagine."
Read this collection slowly and savor it.
As I expected given what I'd previously read of him, Walcott's central interest is in identity---how it's made in the sparks of the stones of race and history and place and language banging against one another: "Since all of your work was really an effort to appease/the past.../you were distressed by your habitat, you shall not find peace/till you and your origins reconcile." Line like these are wonderful and plentiful.
It may be an issue of personal taste, but if the whole collection was concerned solely with the issues described above, I'd have grown bored. This is not the case here. Walcott is an extraordinary poet because everything he says is said extraordinarily…just as the order of the year provides the formal structure of this collection, each poem sees its speaker in a frantic, melancholic, hopeful, and proud rage for order. LISTEN to these lines "So what shall we do for the dead, to whose conch-bordered/tumuli our lifelong attraction is drawn/as to a magnetic empire. whose cities lie ordered with streets and rational avenues, exact as the grid/of our vibrating metropolis?/In our arrogance, we imagine/that they, too, share the immense, inaudible pulse of the clock-shaped earth.../Any peace so indifferent, where all our differences fuse,/is an insult to imagine."
Read this collection slowly and savor it.
June 15, 2009
Looking for a living poet who doesn't suck? Look no further: Walcott is your man.
March 19, 2013
It was ok.
April 21, 2014
Beautiful verse that practically washed over my consciousnesses. This collection was made to be read aloud in the sunshine in a low, gentle voice. A must-read!
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