Splendor and sadness in Derek Walcott's The Bounty.

Division runs like a seam through the biography of the Nobel Prize-winning Caribbean-born poet Derek Walcott--his task has been to make it more boon than burden. He and his twin brother, Roderick, were born in 1930 in St. Lucia, a small link in the Antilles island chain, then part of the British West Indies. Walcott's was a British education. The paucity of books in his native St. Lucia led, paradoxically, to an excellent literary education grounded in the heavily accented rhythms of Shakespeare, the Anglican hymnal, and the King James Bible.

Even as he pursued a college education, Walcott absorbed the parallel oral culture of the Caribbean, particularly audible in his plays, some of which adopt his native Creole dialect. His early poems register both geographical distances and the divisions within himself. In Crusoe's Island (1965), he is both Robinson Crusoe and "Friday's progeny,/ The brood of Crusoe's slave." His more recent poetry, especially the epic Omeros of 1990, wavers between an exile's nostalgia and a cosmopolitan's at-homeness in the world.

The title of The Bounty, Walcott's first book of poems since Omeros, is a tangle of associations. Walcott is, first of all, acknowledging his 1992 Nobel Prize in literature, which (quoting the Irish Nobel Laureate W.B. Yeats) he calls " 'the bounty of Sweden.' " The prize paid for Walcott's retreat on St. Lucia: "this house facing white combers that stands/ for hot, rutted lanes far from the disease of power." Second, Walcott is playing off the celluloid The Bounty of Fletcher Christian and the "white God ... Captain Bligh," which rhymes in his mind with the ebb and flow of Caribbean tyranny and freedom: "The ribbed body with its cargo/ stalls in its doldrums, the God-captain is cast adrift/ by a mutinous Christian." Finally--a major theme of this slim book--there is the recurring light of each Antillean day: "Bounty!/ In the bells of tree-frogs with their steady clamour/ in the indigo dark before dawn, the fading morse/ of fireflies and crickets, then light on the beetle's armour."

Despite its upbeat title, The Bounty is a book of elegies, a response to the "many deaths, nothing short of a massacre"--including the deaths of his mother and his close friend, the poet Joseph Brodsky--that Walcott has endured during his seventh decade. As he improvises on themes from the Western elegiac tradition, in which spring consoles for the losses of winter, Walcott finds that certain notes don't sound in the tropics, where there is "no climate, no calendar except for this bountiful day." And he is surprised, as elegists always are, "that earth rejoices/ in the middle of our agony."

If Omeros, like its Homeric model, was a poem about fathers, The Bounty is Walcott's mother book, an attempt "to draw the veiled figure/ of Mamma entering the standard elegiac." The seven-part title poem is both an elegy for her and a poem about her island, Walcott's "mother-country." Its opening lines attempt to pry the beauty of the Antilles loose from advertising brochures, that false paradise in which, as Walcott wrote in his Nobel lecture, "the Caribbean is a blue pool into which the republic dangles the extended foot of Florida":

Between the vision of the Tourist Board and the true
Paradise lies the desert where Isaiah's elations
force a rose from the sand. The thirty-third canto

cores the dawn clouds with concentric radiance,
the breadfruit opens its palms in praise of the bounty,
bois-pain, tree of bread, slave food, the bliss of John Clare,

torn, wandering Tom, stoat-stroker in his county ...

In those seven lines, freighted with the layered voice of European culture, Dante's vision of paradise is invoked both explicitly, in the "concentric radiance" of the last canto of his Paradiso, and implicitly, in his braided terza rima (three-line stanzas, rhyming--loosely here--aba, bcb, etc.). That paradise is linked, in turn, with Isaiah's prophecy of the imminent appearance of God in the desert, a promise confirmed, in the Christian view, by Jesus' birth.

But Walcott also wants an outsider's view on this exalted material, and he finds it in the 19^th-century English peasant-poet John Clare, whom he makes into a stand-in for himself. Walcott twins Clare--who was driven mad by social injustice and consoled by the smallest beings in nature--with mad Tom, Edgar's disguise in King Lear, who, like Clare, wanders the English countryside praising frogs and gnats: "I am moved like you, mad Tom, by a line of ants;/ I behold their industry and they are giants." This couplet sends us back to an already famous passage in Omeros, in which women loading coal are compared to a line of ants--and so on.