Love After Love Belonging

English 1B
Word Count: 1623
“The Stranger Who Was Your Self.” “Feast on your life.” Every time I hear that phrase it sends goose bumps all over my body and chills down my spine. “Love After Love” by Derek Walcott sends strong messages through his multi-cultural upbringing. Walcott was raised in Castries, St. Lucia, an ex-British colony, that reflects a lot through his Caribbean culture in his poems. Mr. Housden believes this poem is about “alienation and belonging” and “homecoming and exile” and I disagree with that and also his opinion on the “stranger.” I believe what Walcott’s true intent of this poem was how through his life he has had to counter-balance both cultures in his life to try to meet at one point to both express his
Caribbean culture and the British culture. When I read the poem, for some reason I want to say that this poem is about change. It’s about change in one’s inner self and wanting to get better so you can love yourself and allow yourself to love others. Through songs and personal experience I will show how this poem is more about change than “alienation” like Housden suggested. Housden thought people might interpret the meaning differently depending on their own “experiences of alienation and belonging.” But I believe that this poem is about change in one’s inner soul.
There’s a new song that just came out by Damien Marley and Nas called “My Generation.” In the song, rapper Lil’ Wayne has a short verse where he says, “I heard change starts with the man in the mirror.” When I heard this I could not help to think to go back to this poem where Walcott mentions “mirror” once at the beginning and once at the end of his poem as well. I believe looking into the mirror allows you to see your entire self and not try to cheat anything away that you are not. When looking into the mirror, look at yourself and see if you on the outside agree with the one on the inside. And if that’s not the case, you have some discovering to do, either through love or from other life
experiences.

Another song that screams change and I couldn’t help to think of when I read this poem is Michael Jackson’s “Man in the Mirror.” He starts off the song by saying, “Gonna make a change” and will make him “feel good.” This made me relate to the part in the poem where once after he had looked in the mirror, Walcott says, “And each will smile at each other’s welcome,” that once you looked in the mirror, you know what change you have to make and it makes both sides of your self “feel good.” Obviously when any one gets an image of themselves and a mirror, you will always see yourself in it, so Michael Jackson urges us to “Take a look at yourself and make a change” and that change needs to benefit the inside of you and the outside of yourself needs to reflect it. The next part of the poem I would like to talk about is how Housden portrays the “stranger” in the poem. I know the big picture of the poem is that this may be about how one may have lost their true love and now he is trying to overcome it as best as possible, but I believe it’s something deeper as well. Housden believes that the “stranger” in the poem is actually the “natural current of life.” And sometimes when you are going against the current that’s when things tend to go “awry.” However, I believe the “stranger” is your inner self and inner self has loved you. But the inner self hasn’t loved you lately because you have been going away from your core values and beliefs you once had that your outer self is not portraying any more. Now you have to change something inside of you, so that your outer self will then coexist with inner self, or the “stranger,” could possibly love you again. But Housden at the end of that section gives a brief description that is closely related to what I think as well. Housden proposes that the “time will come when ‘you’ have imagined yourself to be for so long…greet this other ‘you’ and both will smile in welcome.” I agree with this because it’s both of yourselves coming together, who don’t meet too often, will smile no matter how different they are because they are still in the same person. Others may have conflicting selves, but when they meet, they will smile and that’s when the inner self needs to make a change for the best of both worlds. This poem made me think of a past experience in my lifetime and now looking back on it, I kind of lived this poem. I know this is the reason why Walcott used the future tense, so he could essentially make the reader feel that the poem was in fact part of their life. Housden restates it throughout his “Feast on Your Life” essay how this poem makes you think of yourself even though it may have nothing to do with you, but that’s what Walcott wanted. Well the story starts like this, it was towards the end of my first year in college at the University of Oregon and everything was going great. I made tons of new friends, liked the environment around the campus, loved the sports atmosphere, but there was one problem; I had nearly flunked every class I had taken. Right after leaving school and returning back home, I now realized that I’m going to have to go to community college. After my first quarter at Foothill, I had met some friends, but wasn’t having fun like I was at Oregon and again did poorly on my grades. This time I managed to pass, but it was clearly not acceptable. That winter, I remember walking into the bathroom and looking at myself in the mirror. I kept thinking to myself, “Is this truly what you are? A “C” student that doesn’t care enough or try hard enough to pass college?” I told myself that night that I need to make a drastic change in my life that putting school before anything else was the most important thing I could do. My inner self always knew the importance of school, but my outer self failed to recognize this because of all the fun I was having. My outer self had convinced me that the point of college was to have fun first and go to school second. I learned the hard way that it takes losing something that you truly loved, like all of my friends that still go to Oregon, just because school was never a priority. Now my inner self has helped me distinguish what’s “right” for me and have tried my hardest to balanced my inner and outer selves appropriately. Now that we are looking at ourselves in the mirror, Walcott tells us “Feast on your life.” Now that we have “peel[ed] [our] image from the mirror,” which means now that once you have analyzed your life, start to make the appropriate changes in your life and start to apply them. Housden says “wherever you have hidden yourself, there is always time to come out into the light of the day.” That’s the same concept in which I said when your inner self is hiding, and your outer self is taking all the attention, you won’t ever be true to your inner self. The inner self always needs to outshine what’s on the outside, because the inner self is the most important and it’s what you truly believe. Changing yourself will only make yourself better, as long you analyze deep inside of you to find the thing that truly needs changing. If you change in the right places, either your love life or your feelings towards yourself will change greatly and hopefully for the best. I’ve read from a numerous amounts of critics that this poem speaks largely to Walcott’s cultures. I have read that they believe that this is essentially the “black” part of his Caribbean culture against his “white” British part of his culture and how they two are trying to find an equilibrium point. In a way, my opinion of the meaning of Walcott’s “Love After Love” is kind of the same. I have just related it to my life instead of knowing that part of Walcott’s life as I first read the poem. Now hearing this explanation I guess it makes sense, but I believe that my change theme is truly better. I know there is no essential wrong answer or even right answer to the true meaning of the poem, only Derek Walcott knows the true meaning because he wrote it. But through different musicians and a personal experience later, I believe that the overall message is about the change in one’s inner self. I see this poem as a person who may be trying to find love after failing again, or having the feeling of love again and coming up short how this may help them. But I see it, as these people need to look in the “mirror” and see what made them fail. What do they need to CHANGE in order either find love or just find their way in life. They are essentially looking the “mirror” and trying to discover a change that in fact may change their life if they adjust correctly. I will leave you with a quote in which my SAT tutor would always tell me, after good and after bad times, "Don't let the darkness of the past cover the brightness of the future."