In *The Prodigal*, Derek Walcott shapes a book-length meditation on departure, return, and the uneasy relation between home and imagination. The speaker moves through remembered and actual landscapes—New York’s Greenwich Village, European cities, and other places charged with personal history—while reflecting on aging, artistic vocation, memory, and the persistent pull of origins. Its lyric, reflective voice treats travel as both physical movement and inward reckoning, drawing on the figure of the prodigal to examine what is gained and lost through exile. The poem’s attention to place, language, and self-scrutiny makes it a late-career work of poetic introspection, rooted in Walcott’s Caribbean background while reaching across broader literary and geographic traditions.

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