How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.Section.Page)
Quote #7
He mutters its fluent alphabet, the peaked A of a spire,/the half-vowels of bridges, down to the crumpled Z/of his overcoat draping a bench in midsummer's fire./He read the inverted names of boats in their element (XXXVIII.ii.195)
Omeros-as-bargeman watches life around modern-day London and learns about its history through an "alphabet" of the landscape. This is an unspoken language, as if the city had a body that could send out non-verbal signals to the visitor.
Quote #8
The child-voiced brook repeated History's lesson/as an elder clapped its leaves in approbation/until others swayed to the old self-possession/for which faith is know; but which faith, in a nation/split by a glottal scream, by a sparrow's chirrup/from a sniper's bolt? (XXXIX.i.199)
The narrator is visiting Glendalough, Ireland, and hearing the history of violence in the "voices" of the landscape. His knowledge of history helps him to read the silent languages of the place—and yes, this makes the trip way less fun, since he has to bear the burden of history as he travels through Europe.
Quote #9
[…] her mossed skull heard/the ants talking the language of her great-grandmother,/the gossip of a distant market, and she understood,/the way we follow our thoughts without any language,/why the ants sent her this message to come to the wood/where the wound of the flower, its gangrene, its rage/festering for centuries, reeked with corrupted blood (XLVIII.ii.243-244)
Ma Kilman has a reversion experience as she leaves the Christian church to follow the voices of the ants. Yes, ants. Remember that Walcott compares the women who carried coal to the oceanliners to ants (we might even call them ant-cestors… you know, if we were into cheesy puns…). Ma Kilman's journey is painful, since she recalls ancestral suffering, but she does find a cure for Philoctete's wound.