LITR / CRCL 5734: Colonial & Postcolonial Literature

Student Poetry Presentation, 2003

Reading from Derek Walcott's poem," The Season of Phantasmal Peace"

Reader: Natalie Martinez   
Respondent: Mindi Swenson
Recorder: April Davis
Date:   Monday, 9 June


Presenter’s Discussion of the Poem:

•  The poem is located on pages 464-5 in our text.
•  One major theme in this poem centers on an image of peace.
•  One strong metaphor in this poem is the “multitudinous birds” equaling  the multitudinous cultures.
•  READING OF THE POEM
•  The oxymoron’s such as “icy sunlight”, “peaceful cries” and “soundless   voices” are perhaps meant to point out  man’s functioning in a contradiction.
•  The figurative language such as “covering this world like the vines of an orchard, or a mother drawing the trembling gauze over the trembling eyes of a child fluttering to sleep..” is used to illustrate how nurturing the phantasmal light from the birds that men cannot see.
•  The repetition of “shadows” in the first paragraph sounds very similar to the parallelism that is present in bible scripture. The repetition is useful in pointing out the contrast between the shadows and the phantasmal light omitted by the passing birds.
•  There was no previous student presentation on this poem so I tried researching this poem from the web. Not much success there other than what I am assuming are criticisms in German; however, I did run across an interview with Walcott himself from a forum called “Opening Address”, in one passage Walcott describes his politics of culture. Highlighted selection to be read aloud.
•  Walcott considers this poem “the equivalent of prayer, a vision of peace that must be heard continually.”

Question for the Class:
The two strongest sensory images in this poem are sight and sound. I am especially interested in Walcott’s use of the word “soundless”. What does Walcott suggest by using the word “soundless” in relation to the birds? They have “soundless voices”, the “net rising soundless as night, the birds’ cries soundless”? In other words what is Walcott suggesting about the soundlessness of the rising of the birds?

Class Comments:

Mindi:  He envisions peace for everyone…it is obtainable.  The soundlessness of the birds represents peace.

Kayla:  I see the birds as the colonizers.  The soundlessness represents the new language and written language that the colonized did not understand, so it might as well have been soundlessness.

Mindi:  The birds take the darkness out of the city, leaving only silence. They lifted it up and at the highest point they reached, that was the peace.

Kim:  When you talk about the birds with all their different dialects, all their different tongues, all their different voices…then the net captures them all and puts them in one nest.  Sort of like the imperialist net captured the different peoples and forced them to become part of a dominant culture. The soundless cries are because they are not heard. Or the net is soundless as it creeps up and captures. Also, there are a lot of –less words like soundless and seasonless.

Ginger:  It’s like the self and other – a sort of tug of war.  The silence is the struggle.

Natalie:  (reads from the Walcott interview) In reality the U.S. is an empire; the beauty is that it doesn’t want to be. Walcott calls his poem a prayer and a vision of peace.

Dr. White:  I like the prayer idea. I think that a way to connect it with A Passage to India would be in terms of the mystical. It’s kind of visionary, it’s kind of uplifting, it’s kind of whole.  Mysticism seeks to unify all things. Mysticism works in terms of oxymorons.  One way of looking at it is God is a circle of reality with a circumference everywhere and a center nowhere –pulled two directions at once.  An example would be Godbole (main Hindu mystic). He sees things in terms of the many and the one.  The unity that encompasses multiplicity. Hinduism is an extreme version of a unitary reality or God going under many names. 

Kristi:  Like the trinity.