Derek Walcott Venus

This will be small-minded.

First, an aside.

I could not help but notice a strange parallel between Robert Graves in the trenches (1915?), the bombardments, (Goodbye to All That) and Elizabeth Smart's (1938?) kangaroos in a garden (on the subject of time).

Now, the unwelcome gristle.

Walcott "North and South" (1981) has Venus rising in an opening stanza that also carries both a full moon and a sunset.

Through the weeks, you might speak of Venus rising in the west (when first seen at sunset.)  But the rising Venus of morning is the only rising Venus, whether, as he reminds us, she survives translation or not.

Poetic license ?  Not with the planets.

More a question of knowing eastern and western, whether to your north or to your south.

Geddes has a photon flashing innumerable times among crystals in the snow.  Can he escape knowing that a photon takes millions of years to translate from the solar core to the shell of the sun ?  Was this his parallel? What is the poet to know of the local inferno ? The flipping magnetic poles ?

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