Love After Love by Derek Walcott

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Love After Love by Derek Walcott
Theme self-discovery
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SELF-DISCOVERY

• Walcott suggests that we spend years assuming an
  identity, but eventually discover who we really
  are and this is like 2 different people meeting
  and making friends and sharing a meal together.

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Love After Love

• Walcott presents this in terms of the love feast
  or Eucharist of the Christian church EatGive
  wine. Give bread.
• It is not clear whether this other person is
  human or in some way divine.

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Love After Love

• The poem begins with the forecast of the time
  when this recognition will occur a moment of
  great happiness (elation) as yougreet
  yourself and each will smile at the others
  welcome.

• The second stanza suggests that one has to fit in
  with others ideas or accommodate oneself to the
  world and so become a stranger to oneself-but in
  time one will see who the stranger really is, and
  welcome him or her home.

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Love After Love

• Our everyday life is seen as a kind of temporary
  disloyalty, in which one ignores oneself for
  another but all along it is the true self, the
  stranger who has loved you and who knows you
  by heart.

• When this time comes, then one can recall and
  review ones own life look at the record of
  love-letters, photographs and notes, and what one
  sees in the mirror and sit and feast on ones
  life.

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Love After Love

• The poem is written in the second person as if
  the poet addresses the reader directly. It is
  full of imperative verbs (commands) sit,
  give, eat, take and feast.

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Love After Love

• The poet repeats words or variants of them
  give, love, stranger and life.

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Love After Love

• The verse form is irregular but most lines are
  loosely iambic (a short syllable followed by a
  long syllable, as in delay)and some (the 8th and
  13th for e.g) are quite regular tetrameters (4
  pairs of syllables).

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Love After Love

• This is a very happy poem, especially in its view
  of the later years of life, not as a time of loss
  but of fulfillment and recovery.

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Love After Love
What do you think this poem means? Why does the
poet imagine someone as being like two different
people at the same time?
How important is it for us to recognise what we
are really like and accept ourselves for this?
Why is the poem written to you rather than
about me? Is the poet giving advice to
everyone?
Why does the poem use images of feasting?