The poet and playwright Derek Walcott was born on this day in 1930 in Saint Lucia, an island country in the eastern Caribbean. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1992 “for a poetic oeuvre of great luminosity, sustained by a historical vision, the outcome of a multicultural commitment”. How does Walcott’s verse rate? The poetry critic William Logan summed it up with faint praise: “No living poet has written verse more delicately rendered or distinguished than Walcott, though few individual poems seem destined to be remembered.” This one is, we feel.