Dear Editor,
My thanks to Mr Creighton for taking the time to read, ‘In a Boston Night’ and to write on it (‘Arts on Sunday,’ SS 2.11.08). His interpretation is intriguing.
Two observations: First, Mr Creighton’s note, “But the poet missed an irony,” regarding Penelope’s faith needs a little clarification. The irony was neither missed nor lost. Rather, that irony was not the focus of such a short poem. One may, on that same note, want to point out missed ironies in Walcott’s long epic poem, ‘Omeros’ set in the Caribbean and elsewhere: the “imitation” of and “lack of originality” in naming and form (especially in view of the fact that he has been one of the critics of Naipaul’s sentence − taken out of context? − on creativity in the region; when the President referred to Walcott as the Homer of the Caribbean during Carifesta, perhaps, that might have been Naipaul in the mouth of a politician, but economists do not know about irony!); or the irony of writing on Marley’s ‘Buffalo Soldiers’ in his epic and missing the inadvertent grief the ‘Buffalo Soldiers’ contributed to the lives of native Americans. The point is, these and other (in any 300-page epic you can be sure there are many) missed ironies were not the focus of Walcott’s fine epic.
One of the last poems in my collection, on page 71, speaks to just such readings “…How flows the Demerara,/dear brother, still out to the Atlantic?”
Second, Mr Creighton talks about unhelpful details: ‘“Ulysses, whom you may know better” and “Hanuman? Who? That one you may call the monkey God” in a kind of subtle contemptuous reference to western ignorance of Hinduism as against a common embracing of the Greek myths. It is disappointing to see that Mr Creighton took these two lines, which form part of a sentence/thought, out of context. The fuller sentence reads, “That one you may call/“the monkey God” was neither monkey/Nor man…” and deals with a deep philosophical issue that is ignored by millions of Hindus. What was as disappointing here is that Mr Creighton, who started out and ends with the premise that this poem is also, among other things, a personal poem/love poem seems to forget this – conveniently. If the persona in the poem is speaking to a very dear friend/lover, then, surely, this line is also playful and teasing and informative and, yes, referencing/recalling, fondly, a particular dialogue on the philosophy of Hinduism woven around the intrigues of courtship and love…
Many thanks, again, to Mr Creighton for taking the time to read, ‘In a Boston Night’ and to write on it. To quote from a poem in this book, “I know no irony…”
Yours faithfully,
Sasenarine Persaud
