Chapter 4 - ‘Is there that I born’: Another Life, Sea Grapes, The Star-Apple Kingdom

Summary

By the time The Castaway was published, in October 1965, Walcott had been working, for some six months, at what was to become Another Life. By the time Another Life appeared, in 1973, The Gulf had also long been published. Another Life shares certain qualities with The Castaway and The Gulf, but it also inaugurates new departures in Walcott's poetry. It assimilates from the two immediately preceding collections the Crusoesque concentration on ‘bare necessities’ (CP, 92) and on positioning oneself at a vantage point of separation from which one ‘appraises objects [self and world] surely’ (CP, 92). At the same time, Another Life strikes a new note of exhilaration triggered by the unlocking of memory and the challenge and release of a story that was waiting to be told. The poem's success as a long narrative no doubt encouraged the smaller, but remarkable efforts represented by ‘The Schooner Flight’ and ‘The Star-Apple Kingdom’ in the collection titled after the latter.

The identification of Crusoe with Adam as the paradigmatic ‘maker’ given the privilege of creating a new world out of nothing, so to speak, finds autobiographical confirmation and illustration in the story of how the young poet-painter was ‘blest with a virginal, unpainted world / with Adam's task of giving things their names’ (CP, 294). Contemplation of this privilege brings with it a fuller, more experience-deepened statement of the poet's identification with home, its landscape and people, than we find in the early lyrics which celebrate home.