The poem beginning “The day, with all its pain ahead, is yours” is an untitled work by Derek Walcott, included in The Prodigal. Brinda Bose’s 2017 remembrance returns to it as a way of considering what poetry can preserve—and what admiration for an artist must not make readers overlook.
Which poem is “The day, with all its pain ahead, is yours” from?
It is the opening line of an untitled Derek Walcott poem, commonly identified by that first line rather than by a formal title. The poem appears in The Prodigal. The Poetry magazine historical index records its appearance in the September 2004 issue, volume 184, page 365. That magazine listing establishes a publication record; it should not be confused with the publication date of the book.
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A Brandeis School of San Francisco reflection also identifies the poem by its first line and discusses its movement through grief. Readers looking for the poem can seek it in The Prodigal; the sources cited here do not provide a verified full-text edition online.
How the poem sees the world after loss
The poem begins by attending to the material world: sea, leaves, branches, grass, birds, a house. In Bose’s reading, this close inventory does not make grief disappear. Instead, loss changes the way the living landscape is seen. Its brightness is newly legible against pain, and the poem’s attention to ordinary things becomes a way of registering what death has altered.
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The Brandeis reflection likewise reads the poem as an account of a world exposed by loss and moving toward healing. These are interpretations of the poem, not a claim that grief follows one universal course. Its force lies in holding the hurt and the renewed perception together.
Bose’s remembrance: art made from fragments
Published in March 2017, Bose’s essay approaches Walcott through memory, history, empire, and the difficult work of making poetry. She invokes the image from his Nobel lecture of a broken vase reassembled by love: “Break a vase, and the love that reassembles the fragments is stronger than that love which took its symmetry for granted when it was whole.” The repaired object bears visible scars; in Bose’s account, those marks matter. They suggest how art can carry histories of fracture rather than conceal them.
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Bose also quotes Walcott describing poetry as excavation and self-discovery: “There is the buried language and there is the individual vocabulary, and the process of poetry is one of excavation and of self-discovery.” The image helps explain why this remembrance treats poems not as polished escape from history, but as work that digs into inherited language and lived experience.
Remembering the poet without excusing the allegations
Bose’s essay places Walcott’s literary legacy alongside allegations of sexual harassment and the distress associated with them. Those allegations should be understood here as claims presented in her article; the sources cited here do not independently corroborate or adjudicate them. A remembrance that praises the poems while allowing that context to vanish would not represent Bose’s argument.
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- Author: Walcott, Derek.
- Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
- Pages: 336
- Publication Date: 2007-12-26
- Edition: First Edition
The essay’s ethical difficulty is not resolved by choosing either admiration or condemnation as the only permissible response. It asks readers to keep the achievement and the allegations in view at once: to recognize what the work can do while refusing to let its beauty serve as an answer to claims about conduct. The poem beginning “The day…” becomes, in this frame, a testament left by a flawed artist—not an acquittal.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.About the essay’s date
Scroll’s page metadata dates Bose’s remembrance to March 19, 2017. Her Jawaharlal Nehru University faculty CV lists April 2, 2017. The available records therefore differ; the essay is best described as published in March 2017, without treating the CV’s later date as the original publication date.
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- Author: Walcott, Derek.
- Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
- Pages: 528
- Publication Date: 1987-01-01
- Edition: First Edition
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