Sea Grapes by Derek Walcott
Event Details
That sail which leans on light,
tired of islands,
a schooner beating up the Caribbean
for home, could be Odysseus,
home-bound on the Aegean;
Nobel Laurate Derek Walcottt was born in Castries, St Lucia in 1930. His work as a poet and playwright earned him many awards during his long career, including the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1992 ‘for a poetic oeuvre of great luminosity, sustained by a historical vision, the outcome of a multicultural commitment’. During his Nobel Prize lecture he commented on the nature of poetry:
“Poetry, which is perfection’s sweat but which must seem as fresh as the raindrops on a statue’s brow, combines the natural and the marmoreal; it conjugates both tenses simultaneously: the past and the present, if the past is the sculpture and the present the beads of dew or rain on the forehead of the past. There is the buried language and there is the individual vocabulary, and the process of poetry is one of excavation and of self-discovery. Tonally the individual voice is a dialect; it shapes its own accent, its own vocabulary and melody in defiance of an imperial concept of language, the language of Ozymandias, libraries and dictionaries, law courts and critics, and churches, universities, political dogma, the diction of institutions. Poetry is an island that breaks away from the main. The dialects of my archipelago seem as fresh to me as those raindrops on the statue’s forehead, not the sweat made from the classic exertion of frowning marble, but the condensations of a refreshing element, rain and salt.“
Sea Grapes is a layered poem that uses the story of Odysseus as an allegory to explore freedom and longing in his own time and place. Linking the Aegean world of Homer with his Caribbean home is an idea he was to consider in more depth in his most famous work Omeros, making Sea Grapes an excellent introduction to Walcott’s themes and ideas.
During the study we’ll read the poem aloud multiple times, allowing us to explore its meaning and the beautiful rhythms of its language. Join us for an engaging two hours of reading and discussion.
JOINING DETAILS:
- Single session live online study led by Caroline Hammond
- Wednesday 14 January 2026, 6.00–8.00 pm GMT
- £35 for two hour meeting to include background materials and opening notes
- Sea Grapes can be read on The Poetry Foundation website
