White Egrets
by Derek Walcott
Summary
White Egrets is Derek Walcott's great late book, published when the Nobel laureate was eighty, and its presiding spirits are the birds of the title, the white egrets that stalk the lawns and shallows of his native St Lucia, arriving and departing like visitations, and standing, as the poems openly let them, for the dead, for inspiration, and for the departures the poet knows are coming. The collection is a long looking back conducted in the present tense of an old man still ravished by the visible world: elegies for dead friends, unembarrassed poems of late love and its humiliations, returns to the villages, harbors, and headlands of the island he made into a literary country, and journeys out through Spain, Italy, and the cities of the empire whose colonial burden and inherited beauty had been his lifelong double subject. The verse is the famous instrument at full stretch one last time, long breathed lines, painterly light, the sea in every register, and the drama of the book is watching that abundance contend with its own ending, the painter's eye assessing failing powers and finding, on the evidence of the poems themselves, that the rumors of decline were premature. White Egrets won the 2010 T.S. Eliot Prize, the first time the award crowned a Nobel laureate's new work since Heaney, and the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature the following year, and when Walcott died in 2017 it stood as the closing masterpiece, the book in which the century's greatest Caribbean poet took his leave of the light he had spent a life describing.
Historical Context & Significance
Walcott had held every honor the language offers since the 1992 Nobel, and Omeros had settled his claim two decades before White Egrets appeared in 2010, so the Eliot Prize functioned as Britain's acknowledgment of a farewell; he was by then dividing his years between St Lucia and teaching posts abroad, including at Essex. The award also mattered for the prize itself, adding the largest name on its roll. Caribbean poetry's next generation has written both toward and against him, and when Roger Robinson took the same prize nine years later, the coverage counted him the second winner of Caribbean heritage, Walcott being the measure. The egrets themselves now carry his name in the region's literary memory, the way Yeats owns swans.