Attempt a critical analysis of the poem ‘Names’ by Derek Walcott.

Analysis of the poem ‘Names’ by Derek Walcott. In the first section of “ Names,” the speaker describes the morning of his race, the Caribbean people. At first  they were like the ocean, undetermined and looking down at the seafloor and up to the welkin, rather than across the land to other places and peoples. Now they're in the world. To trace the line from also to now, the speaker, like his race, must begin without knowledge of the history or the future. He looks for the moment where their collaborative view of the world shifted from the ocean and came divided by the horizon, but he can not find it. Analysis of the poem ‘Names’ by Derek Walcott.

His race of people came from countries across the settled world — Benares in India, Canton in China, and Benin, a country in West Africa — and they've lost their recollections of who they were before they were taken from their motherlands. Analysis of the poem ‘Names’ by Derek Walcott.  The speaker therefore goes back to the only morning of his race he can remember, a morning like the harsh cry of a “ ocean-eagle” as his people first tried to articulate a sense of tone when they arrived in the Caribbean. Yet that world left them with nothing. Analysis of the poem ‘Names’ by Derek Walcott.

In the alternate section, the lyric shifts to bandy language and the ways the European pioneers shaped the chart of the Caribbean. They mockingly named the kudos and timbers they encountered after the places they remembered in Europe, and called a sty"Versailles" (the name of King Louis XIV's opulent palace). The Europeans grew resentful, starting to perceive the Caribbean as a place of exile and to begrudge its land and fruits. Analysis of the poem ‘Names’ by Derek Walcott.

Analysis of the poem ‘Names’ by Derek Walcott. As they grew resentful, they began to detest the memory of the countries they had lost, yet the names stuck. Europeans believed in “ the right of every thing to be a noun,” or felt that converting rudiments of the world into distinct particulars with names was a way of validating them. The enslaved African people brought to the Caribbean accepted this but changed the names as they repeated them back, used their own voices to transfigure this social register. They bent the names the way the wind bends the world.

 Therefore they came to see the world else. The triumphs which the colonial mockingly named Versailles are in fact lesser than that palace ever was, because they were made by nature, not by man. The fallen trees, compared to fallen columns in the names of the Europeans, are lesser than Castille because they too were destroyed by nature, not by man. In this configuration of the world, the worm is a lesser emperor than any mortal sovereign. The Caribbean children can therefore look up to the welkin in a timber named for Valencia, Spain, and yet see the stars not as the European constellations, but as “ fireflies caught in molasses”.

Analysis of the poem ‘Names’ by Derek Walcott.

The first stanza of “ Names” establishes the sonic aesthetic of the lyric, which employs reiteration and deliberate syntax rather than minstrelsy or cadence to establish a meter. Walcott repeats “ began” in the first line, and repeats the expression structure “ with no nouns … with no horizon” in the alternate. The third and fourth line are slightly less constrained, but still begin with the word “ with,” a reiteration which also establishes a analogous syntax for each line in the stanza. In a sense, the first stanza acts as a exemplification of the lyric as a whole, establishing some of the strategies Walcott will use throughout, as well as introducing the most important themes.

Analysis of the poem ‘Names’ by Derek Walcott. The patterns of reiteration established in the first four lines continue through the rest of the first section. Both the alternate and third stanza repeat a word or expression at the morning of multiple lines “ in the” in lines 6 and 7, “ I began with” in lines 8 and 9. In lines 20 through 22, “ The goldsmith from Benares/ the gravestone- knife from Canton/ the bronzesmith from Benin,” Walcott repeats the same syntax three times while invoking different places from across the settled world. Then, this reiteration suggests the way that the colonization flattens the differences between these culturally and geographically distinct locales. Indeed as the minstrel names each specific position, and asserts that the people who came from them had both a public identity and a particular identity, similar as goldsmith or gravestone- knife, the structure of the lyric has begun to abolish those distinctions just as colonization and slavery created peoples who couldn't remember their motherlands.

Walcott’s use of reiteration suggests the conventions of reports or apologues, which frequently calculate on the reiteration of certain expressions to prop the memory of the fibber and produce a sense of events erecting upon one another in the environment of a simple plot. The story of Goldilocks and the Three Bears is a good illustration of this. On a purely aesthetic position, also, reiteration makes the lyric sound better, makes it more memorable, and reminds the followership to pay attention to repeated expressions. For illustration, the reiteration of the word “ began” stresses the significance of onsets throughout the first section, reminding the anthology that an origin point can not be so fluently moved on from, indeed if it happed in the distant history. On a structural position, the use of reiteration suggests that Walcott then's creating a kind of chronicle or myth for the morning of his own Caribbean people. Analysis of the poem ‘Names’ by Derek Walcott.

Yet the story that Walcott tells about the morning can not be sufficient, because the forces of colonization have disassociated his people from their own history. He's rather caught in a futile hunt for “ that moment/ when the mind was halved by a horizon” (10-11). This moment is a reference to the idea that European rationality rests on the duty of incongruities, especially between the tone and the Other, or between the mind and the body. From there, European philosophical, artistic, and social tradition assigned power and superiority to one side of the opposition, and pacified the other; most centrally, then, they imagined white society as the tone — familiar, cultivated, and knowing — and settled peoples as the Other — fantastic, uncultivated, and known. Walcott equates the “ moment when the mind was halved by the horizon,” or the moment when these incongruities came into being for Caribbean people, with the morning of his race. He's suggesting then that the veritably conception of a Caribbean people hinges on social ideas which designate a different group of people with distinct histories as one ethnical order, defined in opposition to sanguineness. This is “ that terrible vowel,/ that I,” the speaker says the very act of asserting a identity, an “ I,” is terrible because it occurs in the environment of the violence that brings into actuality a racialized tone.

The lyric thus suggests that indeed the morning for which Walcott is searching is a function of white supremacy and social history. For that reason, the veritably idea of liar or myth- timber is put under pressure. As much as the first section embodies the aesthetics and precedences of chronicle, it can noway really come one because it not only lacks its own morning, but the beginning it seeks out is formerly troubled, formerly a function of the rough forces which Walcott is trying to write against. We see this theme explicitly in the last lines of the first section, where the speaker describes his people left on a bank “ with nothing in our hands/ but this stick/ to trace our names on the beach/ which the ocean canceled again, to our incuriosity” (31-34). The stick then symbolizes the act of jotting or liar, which, according to the speaker, is all his people have left. Yet the ocean returns to abolish the story again and again. Rather than this being a moment of forlornness, the people are “ indifferent.” They are n’t attached to conserving a document of their story, indeed though the capability to write it's each that they have. Indeed, the lyric identifies further with the ocean, to which Walcott first compares his people, than with the act of jotting.

The theme of jotting and language becomes further central in the alternate section of the lyric. Repetition as a erudite device largely disappears in this section, with the syntax getting more conversational and less sing- song. Rather, Walcott employs frequent enjambment, or breaking a line in the middle of expression, as in “ Versailes’colonnades/ superseded by cabbage triumphs/ with Corinthian ridges” (43-45). This device renders the lyric more fractured, replacing a soothing, folkloric meter with one which is out- putting and ragged.

Still, the idea of reiteration becomes important then. The alternate section speaks to the way that the Europeans assessed language on the Caribbean. They superimposed the terrain of their motherland onto the natural geography they encountered; the win trees came the colonnades of Versailles. They therefore imagined that the geography of Europe was repeated everyplace, only in an inferior form. By naming a sty “ little Versailles,” they mockingly repeated and twisted their own language as a way to denigrate the settled land. Ultimately, these names took, indeed as the pioneers began to lose their recollections of the land they had left; the language came a reiteration without an original. Analysis of the poem ‘Names’ by Derek Walcott.