THE ISLANDER.(David Walcott)

We had just finished lunch. Derek Walcott got up from his canvas chair and stretched. He said to his longtime companion, "Sigrid, I am going for a swim." We were on a beach in Castries, the capital of the island of St. Lucia, in the Lesser Antilles, where Walcott was born, in 1930, and where he still lives. It was Bastille Day, a French holiday celebrated in St. Lucia, too. Two boys on horseback, very thin and very black and shoeless, rode along the stretch of ground behind us. Their necks swivelled as they picked up speed, urging their horses to gallop, looking for more and more open space to explore.

Sigrid said, "Oh, all right, Dodo. I'll join you soon."

Walcott walked away. He is bantam weight, with light-blue-gray eyes and honey-colored skin. A black frigate bird--what patois-speaking St. Lucians call a scisour de la mer--cut through the turquoise sky. Sigrid and I looked on as Walcott made his way down to the Caribbean Sea, getting smaller and smaller against the big, watching water.

As Walcott disappeared beneath the surface, Sigrid said, "You know, when he won the Nobel"--for literature, in 1992--"I was worried about our relationship. There were many women around. Speaking generally, West Indian men like to hop from flower to flower." Sigrid laughed. She is sixty years old, German-born, with lemon-colored hair and a burnished face. They met in Pittsburgh, where Sigrid ran an art gallery, in 1986, when Walcott gave a reading at the Carnegie Museum. She offered him a ride home from the reading, and later he invited her to Cleveland to see one of his plays. They have been together since. "I was married once before," she said. "One hopes for . . . an upgrade. And, of course, Derek has been married before. When we got together, and it became clear we would stay together, Derek said, 'I certainly hope this is it.' "

"Sigrid! Look!" Squatting, half out of the water, Walcott hoisted a glistening black boy on his shoulders. The boy's wide, white grin was as unbridled as Walcott's joyful shout.

"Oh, look at Dodo!" Sigrid said. "You know, he paid for that boy to have swimming lessons once he saw that the boy couldn't swim well but wanted to learn. Derek will do that, and never speak of it. So generous."

Walcott, the most ardent chronicler of the island's history and landscape and people, sometimes acts as a patron, a kind of John the Baptist of St. Lucia. ("I would be a preacher, / I would write great hymns," he wrote in the 1973 autobiographical book-length poem "Another Life.") He has lived in the West Indies for most of his creative life, writing, painting, and teaching, not only in St. Lucia but in Jamaica, St. Thomas, Barbados, Grenada, and Trinidad. In nine volumes of poetry, and in numerous essays, speeches, and plays, he has documented life in a place most Americans think of in terms of sunblock and steel drums, and their own fantasies about slimming walks along the beach, limbo lessons, and rum drinks dressed with flowers. Walcott's work revels in the history, the mores, and the differences of a people generally misunderstood, if they are thought about at all.