continually torments Philoctetes, who moans uncontrollably. Later the gods decide that the war cannot be won without him, and the Greek soldiers have to go back to the island and beg him to return with them to battle.
3. French patois, punningly mistranslated below, since hlesse actually means 'wounded.' 4. The owner of the No Pain Cafe, Ma Kilman serves in the poem as a sibyl (female prophet) and an obeah woman (one practicing a kind of West Indian sorcery).
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92 / DEREK WALCOTT
'It have a flower somewhere, a medicine, and ways my grandmother would boil it. I used to watch ants climbing her white flower-pot. But, God, in which place?'
Where was this root? What senna,? what tepid medicinal herb
tisanes, medicinal beverages could clean the branched river of his corrupted blood, whose sap was a wounded cedar's? What did it mean,
this name that felt like a fever? Well, one good heft of his garden-cutlass would slice the damned name clean from its rotting yam. He said, 'Merci.'' Then he left. Thank you (French)
Book Six
Chapter XLIX
i
She bathed him in the brew of the root.1 The basin was one of those cauldrons from the old sugar-mill, with its charred pillars, rock pasture, and one grazing
horse, looking like helmets that have tumbled downhill from an infantry charge. Children rang them with stones. Wildflowers sprung in them when the dirt found a seam.
She had one in her back yard, close to the crotons,0 tree or shrub agape in its crusted, agonized O: the scream of centuries. She scraped its rusted scabs, she scoured
the mouth of the cauldron, then fed a crackling pyre with palms and banana-trash. In the scream she poured tin after kerosene tin, its base black from fire,
of seawater and sulphur. Into this she then fed the bubbling root and leaves. She led Philoctete to the gurgling lava. Trembling, he entered
his bath like a boy. The lime leaves leeched to his wet knuckled spine like islands that cling to the basin of the rusted Caribbean. An icy sweat
glazed his scalp, but he could feel the putrescent shin drain in the seethe like sucked marrow, he felt it drag the slime from his shame. She rammed him back to his place
as he tried climbing out with: 'Not yet!' With a rag sogged in a basin of ice she rubbed his squeezed face the way boys enjoy their mother's ritual rage,
Ma Kilman is bathing Philoctete to heal his wound.
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OMEROS, BOOK 6 / 2593
25 and as he surrendered to her, the foul flower on his shin whitened and puckered, the corolla closed its thorns like the sea-egg. What else did it cure? II The bow leapt back to the palm of the warrior. The yoke of the wrong name lifted from his shoulders. 30 His muscles loosened like those of a brown river that was dammed with silt, and then silkens its boulders with refreshing strength. His ribs thudded like a horse cantering on a beach that bursts into full gallop while a boy yanks at its rein with terrified 'Whoas!' 35 The white foam unlocked his coffles, his ribbed shallop broke from its anchor, and the water, which he swirled like a child, steered his brow into the right current, as calm as In God We Troust2 to that other world, and his flexed palm enclosed an oar with the identi40 ical closure of a mouth around its own name, the way a sea-anemone closes slyly into a secrecy many mistake for shame. Centuries weigh down the head of the swamp-lily, 45its tribal burden arches the sea-almond's? spine, in barracoon3 back yards the soul-smoke still passes, a tree but the wound has found her own cure. The soft days spin the spittle of the spider in webbed glasses, as she drenches the burning trash to its last flame, and the embers steam and hiss to the schoolboys' cries 50 when he'd weep in the window for their tribal shame. A shame for the loss of words, and a language tired of accepting that loss, and then all accepted. That was why the sea stank from the frothing urine of surf, and fish-guts reeked from the government shed, 55 and why God pissed on the village for months of rain. But now, quite clearly the tears trickled down his face like rainwater down a cracked carafe from Choiseul,4 as he stood like a boy in his bath with the first clay's innocent prick! So she threw Adam a towel. 60 And the yard was Eden. And its light the first day's. 1990
2. Near the poem's beginning, the character and mine' (1.1.2). Achille chisels this misspelled phrase into his 3. Barracks for housing convicts or slaves, canoe and then decides, 'Leave it! Is God' spelling 4. A village in Saint Lucia.
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TED HUGHES 1930-1998
Ted Hughes was born in Yorkshire, the son of one of seventeen men from a regiment of several hundred to return from Gallipoli in World War I, a tragedy that imprinted the imagination of the poet. He was educated at Mexborough Grammar School and Pembroke College, Cambridge, where in his last year he changed his course of study from English to archaeology and anthropology, pursuing his interest in the mythic structures that were later to inform his poetry. In 1956 he married the American- born poet Sylvia Plath, who committed suicide in 1963. As poets they explored the world of raw feeling and sensation, a world that Hughes's poems tended to view through the eye of the predator, Plath's through the eye of the victim.
In contrast to the rational I ucidity and buttoned-up forms of Philip Larkin and other English poets of 'the Movement,' Hughes fashions a mythical consciousness in his poems, embodied in violent metaphors, blunt syntax, harsh alliterative clusters, bunched stresses, incantatory repetitions, insistent assonances, and a dark brooding tone. His early books, The Hawk in the Rain (1957) and Lupercal (1960), show the influence of D. H. Lawrence's Birds, Beasts and Flowers (1923), and Hughes's electrifying descriptions of jaguars, thrushes, and pike similarly
