Tone Of Xiv By Derek Walcott

In Derek Walcott’s “XIV,” the speaker, an aged man, is having momentary, but significant, recollection of a childhood experience. This detailed and engraved memory described through Walcott’s tone, selection of detail, usage of tropes, and point of view fully helps to convey the comic surreal nature of aging. The speaker’s recollection of the visit to the elderly woman is rather vivid, revealing to the reader that this particular instance in his life is profoundly unexpected. However, it is also an intoxicating occurrence, moreover, an adventure. The recall of the memory is with great certainty, giving the tone an air of extreme bliss, the very childlike imagination that Walcott wants to portray. The elevated diction employed, conversely, seeks to remind the reader that it is a flashback from an aged perspective. This, at further lengths, portrays “XIV” as more than just a poem recounting an escapade of two brothers, but that it is the speaker reminiscing, giving it a brooding tone as it explores the process of growing old simultaneously through the lens of the young boy and aged man. The details in the poem,

The timeline carries on chronologically, the intense imagery exaggerated to allow the poem to mimic childlike mannerisms. This, subjectively, lets the reader experience the adventure through the young speaker’s eyes. The personification of “sunset”, (5) “shutters”, (8) “shadows”, (19) and “lamplights” (10) makes the world appear alive and allows nothing to be a passing detail, very akin to a child’s imagination. The sunset, alive as it may seem, ordinarily depicts a euphemism for death, similar to the image of the “shutters closing like the eyelids”