I Once Gave My Daughters, Separately, Two Conch Shells… by Derek Walcott
"I Once Gave My Daughters, Separately, Two Conch Shells…" by Derek Walcott is a reflective poem that explores themes of language, love, and the lasting impact of familial connections. Situated within Walcott's broader collection "Midsummer," the poem uses the imagery of conch shells as a poignant symbol of memory and inheritance. It juxtaposes the poet's reminiscences of his daughters and his own youthful poetry, emphasizing the passage of time and the depth of personal history. The ocean serves as a central motif, embodying both the beauty and transience of life, while the poem's long, flowing lines create an intimate and contemplative tone. Walcott weaves in familial legacies, recalling his father’s influence and the significance of names that bind generations together. The act of writing is portrayed as both a means of connection and a confrontation with loss, as the poet navigates his relationship with memory and existence. Ultimately, the poem conveys a nuanced understanding of youth and legacy, reflecting on the interplay between personal and collective histories.
I Once Gave My Daughters, Separately, Two Conch Shells… by Derek Walcott
Excerpted from an article in Magill’s Survey of World Literature, Revised Edition
First published: 1984 (collected in Midsummer, 1984)
Type of work: Poem
The Work
This untitled poem is the fiftieth poem in a sequence of fifty-four poems that constitute the midsummer to midsummer movement in the collection Midsummer (1984). It invokes Walcott’s central themes of language, exile, and art. Yet to these the theme of love must be added. In this poem, as in so many of his other poems, the image of the ocean is primary. In the poem’s twenty-three lines, Walcott moves from a memory of two conch shells that he gave to his daughters to the poetry that he wrote when he was the age of his daughter Elizabeth to his mature poetry. The poem then shifts to a memory of his father and the irony of his name. The poem concludes with a layering of movements, each reflecting the others.
As with all the poems in this collection, the poem’s lines are long, often containing more than fourteen syllables. Such long lines allow for rumination, the overall tone or mood of this poem. The poet speaks directly to the reader, offering both confession and a sense of thinking aloud. The long lines also suggest an inclusiveness that may approximate prose. Most central, however, is their mnemonic quality.
The poem begins with conch shells “dived from the reef, or sold on the beach”: gifts from the sea. In their “wet/ pink palates are the soundless singing of angels.” The term “palates” is a homophone for the painter’s palette; thus, Walcott has combined the angelic sound of the sea, part of the mouth that allows for speech and poetry, and painting. He recommences the poem, linking himself with his daughter, not through a gift but through remembering what he did at her age. This memory forces a realization of his distance from youth.
He reflects on his poetry, stating that his poems “aren’t linked to any tradition/ like a mossed cairn,” but that each poem belongs to the collective memory and unconscious, as well as to the world’s collective history. His poems belong to the sea insofar as they are also natural processes. He relinquishes his poems to the sea or the collective memory. Walcott asks of the poems to let him enter them as his “father, who did watercolors,/ entered his work,” becoming “one of his shadows,/ wavering and faint in the midsummer sunlight.” Walcott asks that his works contain a shadow of his presence, thereby providing a stay against oblivion. He sees his grandfather, who named Walcott’s father Warwick, after Warwickshire, inscribing the continuity of the memory of one’s origins in a name.
“Ironies are moving,” Walcott writes, and then immediately translates that emotion into physical action:
Now, when I rewrite a line,
In these final lines of the poem, Walcott draws together all the strands of the poem’s images. Though the poem strikes an elegiac tone, it also seeks an affirmation in the very act of writing. Although the final sentence of the poem suggests carpe diem, it should be understood ironically for both youth and youth’s sense of immortality passing.
Bibliography
Baugh, Edward. Derek Walcott: Memory as Vision. London: Longman, 1978.
Breslin, Paul. “’I Met History Once, but He Ain’t Recognize Me’: The Poetry of Derek Walcott.” TriQuarterly 68 (Winter, 1987): 168-183.
Brodsky, Joseph. “The Sound of the Tide.” In Less than One: Selected Essays. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1986.
Hamner, Robert D. Derek Walcott. Boston: Twayne, 1981.
Hamner, Robert D., ed. Critical Perspectives on Derek Walcott. Washington, D.C.: Three Continents Press, 1993.
Jay, Paul. “Fated to Unoriginality: The Politics of Mimicry in Derek Walcott’s Omeros.” Callaloo 29, no. 2 (2006): 545-559.
McCorkle, James. “Re-Mapping the New World: The Recent Poetry of Derek Walcott.” Ariel: A Review of International English Literature 17 (April, 1986): 3-14.
Mason, David. “Derek Walcott: Poet of the New World.” Literary Review: An International Journal of Contemporary Writing 29 (Spring, 1986): 269-275.