How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.Section.Page)
Quote #7
My craft required the same/crouching care, the same crabbed, natural devotion/of the hand that stenciled a flowered window-frame/or planed an elegant canoe; its time was gone/with the spirit of the wood, as wood grew obsolete/and plasterers smoothed the blank page of white concrete. (XXXV.ii.227)
The narrator-poet reflects on the crafts, including his own, that are becoming obsolete with the advent of "progress." He sees it in the landscape of his island and knows that traditional ways of life, including the most traditional form of communication (i.e., poetry), are beginning to have no place in the world.
Quote #8
Didn't I want the poor/to stay in the same light so that I could transfix/them in amber, the afterglow of an empire,/preferring a shed of palm-thatch with tilted sticks/to that blue bus-stop? Didn't I prefer a road/from which tracks climbed into the thickening syntax/of colonial travellers, the measured prose I read as a schoolboy? (XXXV.ii.227)
As an artist, Walcott can't help but wonder about his motives for hating progress, and as such, have a serious discussion with himself about how he may be contributing to the poverty of his own people. Oops.
Quote #9
I was both there and not there. I was attending/the funeral of a character I'd created;/the fiction of her life needed a good ending/as much as mine (XLIII.ii.266)
Walcott does this amazing thing as narrator: He actually interacts in the timeline of the narrative as he's creating it. It's pretty fancy and mind-blowing. He also reinforces the idea that the first person ("I") is always fictional, no matter how autobiographical the story may seem.