Omeros is the Greek name for
Homer, though
Derek Walcott´s protagonists
Achille,
Hector and
Philoctete are not epic warriors , but simple
fishermen. Achille´s and Hector´s struggle over
Helen, a beautiful black ( still alluding to the
Illiad and
The Odyssey ) is one current in Walcott´s epic, another is the interior struggle of an individual/ narrator in
exile. It´s a beautiful
poem/
epic, whatever you choose to call it. Walcott´s language and use of
methapors are just wonderful and highly enjoyable once you got into the story. Just to give you an impression:
HELEN AT THE BEACH
“That was when I turned with him towards the village,
and saw, through the caging wires of the noon
sky,
a beach with its padding
panther; now the
mirage
disolved to a woman with a madras head-tie,
but the head proud, although it was looking for work.
I felt like standing in homage to a beauty
That left, like a ship, widening eyes in its wake.
“Who the hell is that ?” a tourist near my table
asked a waitress. The waitress said, “She ? She too proud!”
As the carved lids of the unimaginable
Ebony mask unwrapped from its cotton-wool cloud,
The waitress sneered,”Helen”. And all the rest followed.”
The narrator ( presumably Walcott himself) returns home after his third failed marriage:
“The marriages dissolved like sand through the fingers,
Per mea culpa that had emptied all hope
From cupboards where some scent of happiness lingers
In camphor, in a lost hairpin crusted with soap;
The love I was good at seemed to have been only
The love of my craft and my nature; yes, I was kind,
But with such certitude it made others lonely,
And with such bent industry it had made me blind.”
“It is what Achille learnt under the dark ceiling
Of sea-grapes dripping with rain that puckered the sand:
That there is no error in love,of feeling
The wrong love for the wrong person.”
THE END
“An immense lilac emptiness
Settled the sea. He sniffed his name in one armpit.
He scraped dry scales off his hands. He liked the odours
Of the sea in him. Night was fanning its coalpot
From one catching star.The NO Pain lit its doors
In the village. Achille put the wedge of dolphin
That he´d saved for Helen in Hector´s rusty tin.
A full moon shone like a slice of raw onion.
And when he left the beach the sea was still going on.”