A Latin Primer Poem

526 Words2 Pages

Derek Walcott’s poem A Latin Primer focuses on the influence of Walcott’s education on the process of becoming a poet, the tension between the education opportunities provided by the privileged elite and the richness of folk traditions preserved by the oppressed majority.
The poem stresses the narrator’s frustration with a British educational system that does adjust to the local Caribbean people and landscape. As a child, the narrator felt limited by the rigid established teaching methods that analyze poetry through signs of scansions that he hated and that warped enjoyable, poetic language into murky discipline and Mathematics. The narrator struggles to make sense of the sea of texts. However, the literary text remains detached and dully technical under such algebraic colonial methods: “Raging, Id skip a pebble across the seas page; it stills canned its own syllable: trochee, anapest, dactyl.” (1737)
As an adult, he continued to have to sort out the ways in which he was to personally deal with various colonial cultural differences that divide the European elite from the African ma...

Open Document