Omeros

Overview

About three hundred and twenty-five pages, a poem published in 1990 of some eight thousand lines in loose terza rima set mainly on Walcott’s native island of St Lucia. Two fishermen, Achille and Hector, quarrel over Helen, a proud housemaid; Philoctete suffers from a wound on his shin that will not heal; a retired English officer, Major Plunkett, and his Irish wife Maud research the island’s history; and the poet himself walks through the poem.

Achille, in a sunstroke vision, travels to Africa and meets his ancestor; Hector dies in his taxi; Philoctete is cured by the healer Ma Kilman. The poem also moves to Boston, London, Dublin and the American plains, and ends with the sea going on.

What happens

The island. Fishermen fell trees to make canoes, Philoctete shows tourists his wound, Achille and Hector fight over Helen, who has left Achille and works in Plunkett’s house, and Hector sells his canoe to buy a taxi. The blind old man Seven Seas, whom the poet calls Omeros, sits with his dog.

The Plunketts. Major Plunkett, wounded in the war, and his wife Maud, who is dying, try to give the island a history by researching the eighteenth-century naval battle fought for it, and Plunkett finds a midshipman who shares his name.

Africa. Achille, sunstruck at sea, is carried back to an African river village, meets his ancestor Afolabe, who cannot understand a name that means nothing, sees the slavers come, and returns.

The poet’s wanderings. Walcott walks through Boston, Toronto, Dublin, London and the American plains, where the Sioux at Wounded Knee are set beside the island’s own dispossession, and confronts the ghost of his father, who set him the task of the poem.

Deaths and cures. Maud dies and is buried; Hector crashes his taxi on the road and dies; Ma Kilman, following the ants, finds the herb sprung from a sea-swift’s seed and bathes Philoctete’s wound, which heals.

The close. Helen, pregnant, returns to Achille; the poet meets Omeros and is taken through a Dantean underworld of the island’s dead; the fishermen go out, and the poem ends with the sea going on.

How to read it

Read the Homeric names as a claim the poem makes and then argues with, the fishermen given Achilles and Hector and then insisted upon as themselves.

Pay close attention to Philoctete’s wound as the inherited injury of slavery, and to what it means that the cure is a herb whose seed came from Africa on a swift.

Notice the terza rima, Dante’s measure, carrying island speech and patois across eight thousand lines, and read the form as the argument that the languages of the colonised can bear the tradition that colonised them.

Consider the poet’s confession that his own metaphors have wronged the fishermen, and ask what the poem thinks it costs to write an epic about people who did not ask for one.

Read this poem alongside the Odyssey to see what Walcott took from Homer’s sea and what he refused, and whether Achille’s voyage to Africa is a homecoming or the discovery that there is none.

Questions it raises

• Does giving Homer’s names to St Lucian fishermen ennoble them or colonise them a second time, and does the poem’s own worry about this settle the question?
• What is Philoctete’s wound, and does the cure by an African herb offer a real answer to historical suffering or a poetic wish?
• Why does Plunkett need to give Helen a history, and does the poem think she needs one?
• What does Achille learn in Africa, where his ancestor cannot understand his name, and is the voyage a recovery or a loss?
• What is the poet doing in his own poem, in Boston and London and at his father’s grave, and why must an epic of the island also be an account of leaving it?
• Why does the poem end with the sea going on rather than with a resolution, and what does that ending say about history?