Derek Walcott: Love after Love

Love After Love The time will come when, with elation, you will greet yourself arriving at your own door, in your own mirror, and each will smile at the other’s welcome, And say, sit here. Eat. You will love again the stranger who was yourself. Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart to itself, to the stranger who has loved you all your life, whom you ignored for another, who knows you by heart. Take down the love letters from the bookshelf, the photographs, the desperate notes, peel your own image from the mirror. Sit. Feast on your life.

One of the most powerful and moving poems in the AQA Anthology. It always makes me cry even though I have taught it many times! The recognition of the need for self- communion and self-love is immeasurably tender in its simplicity. The value of the deeply felt life here is revealed in its timelessness: in its recognition that moments of true care to oneself transmute energies that purify and heal.

Instead of investing in the ‘other’in order  to provide  magical dependency and support structures, the poem recommends largesse and dignity. ‘Love after Love’ asserts the need for a  patient and kind love which must involve  oneself and respect the separation from the other.

The poem also seems to me a prayer. It has the peculiar attentiveness and delicate humility of earned knowledge. ‘Sit’ ; ‘Eat’ conjoin us to more profoundly elemental  frameworks of reference than the local devastation  of hurt and grief that recurs through the ‘lived life’. The ritual of dailiness and care open up the world again through words that have been neglected or ignored. The poem is thus a prayer about rebirth and recognition.

‘Feast on your life.’  What an invitation and a promise. Things are only ever finished, never finished with perhaps. The poem is a call for the respect of transience as well as to the power of enduring love. And if healing takes place in the tender distanciation between emotion  and reaction, then the poem recalls the resurrection of the self through faith in oneself; and in oneself who had been lost to the overwhelming immersion of romantic attachment and love.     

We all have within us an invincible summer! A poem to live by.