You can find the text of Sea Grapes at
http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1992/walcott-poetry-seagrapes.html

Talking about imagery is relatively easy because you can discuss it in isolation from everything else. Discussing rhythm and form in a free verse poem like this is almost impossibly difficult because they’re so intimately bound up with the whole dynamic of thought and feeling that makes the poem what it is. And yet to ignore them is to ignore the things most essential to the poem’s life. For example, the impact of the opening line is determined as much by its buoyantly singing iambic rhythm as by the visual information … Continue Reading

You can find the text of Sea Grapes at

http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1992/walcott-poetry-seagrapes.html

What a wonderful poem it is. It leapt off the page when I reached it in Walcott’s Collected Poems 1948 – 1984. My immediate feeling was that this was the most arrestingly alive and intellectually engaging poem in the volume so far.

What makes it come alive and stay alive so vividly? For me it was first of all that wonderful opening image, the way literal and metaphorical suggestions both played into and clashed with each other. The six words of the first line do so much. The use of “That” gives … Continue Reading