To Return To The Trees

“To Return to the Trees” adopts a structure seen in many Walcott poems, the three-line stanza, or tercet. These stanzas effect a steady urgency and agility, at times conversational and often oracular. The speaker may address the reader with a sense of intimacy, as in Lines 10-12: “Or am I lying / like this felled almond / when I write I look forward to age.” In other instances, like the opening three lines, the speaker proclaims with an omniscient voice that might be coming from the earth itself: “Senex, an oak. / Senex, this old sea-almond / unwincing in spray” (Lines 1-3). No formal metrical structure governs the poem; its pace comes instead from consistently short line lengths of two or three accented syllables. Internal rhyme and alliteration, rather than end rhymes, create the poem’s acoustic features.

Besides its useful blend of formal structure and modern austerity, the three-line stanza harks back to terza rima, the more formal, rhyming three-line structure used by Dante for The Divine Comedy. Walcott’s streamlined three-line stanza embodies his intersecting influences, classical and modern. He went on to use the tercet model for his book length

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