How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.Section.Page)
Quote #4
[…] as Lawrence came staggering up the terrace/with the cheque finally, and that treaty was signed;/the paper was crossed by the shadow of her face/as it was at Versailles, two centuries before,/by the shade of Admiral Rodney's gathering force;/a lion-headed island remembering war (V.iii.32)
Walcott takes the opportunity to show that one action or object can evoke memories or associations with larger moments in history. In this case, simply signing a credit card slip transports his mind to other signatures with greater consequences for the island.
Quote #5
A battle broke/out. Lances of sunlight hurled themselves into the sand,/the horse hardened to wood, Troy burned, and a soundless/wrestling of smoke-plumed warriors was spun/from the blowing veils, while she dangled her sandals/and passed through that door of black smoke into the sun. (VI.ii.35)
Remember that we are functioning on two levels in this scene. In the present, Helen is walking down the beach on St. Lucia, passing a boy on a horse and walking through the smoky air. But in the narrator's literary memory, he sees that other Helen moving through the ancient battle outside of Troy. He will speak later of how he cannot disassociate these two Helens and wonders why he can't just see a girl walking down a beach carrying her plastic sandals.
Quote #6
"They walk, you write;/keep to that narrow causeway without looking down,/climbing in their footsteps, that slow, ancestral beat/of those used to climbing roads; your own work owes them/because the couplet of those multiplying feet/made your first rhymes. Look, they climb, and no one knows them;/they take their copper pittances, and your duty/from the time you watched them from your grandmother's house/as a child wounded by their power and beauty is the chance you now have, to give those feet a voice." (XIII.iii.75-76)
Warwick tells his son that as a poet, he has a duty toward history to bear witness to the suffering and work of his ancestors. Note the double meaning of the phrase "couplet of those multiplying feet"—there's poetry in the steps of these women.