This book was waiting for The Prodigal (2004) to complete it. Not only because, at the end, the poet, characteristically addressing himself, describes The Prodigal as ‘what will be your last book’ (P, 99), but more so because the poem seems to draw together in summarizing evaluation many of the concerns that have run through Walcott's work. The valedictory note of the volume only deepens the retrospective summing-up, and is itself the summation of all the leave-takings, actual and anticipated, that have been a feature of his work. This poem is the culmination of all the homecomings in Walcott's poetry that have been rehearsals, as it were, for this one. It replays definitively the cycle of separation and reconnection that has been a dynamic idea in his work.

In a 1983 interview, when Nancy Schoenberger asked Walcott about his ‘youthful desire to leave home’, he replied by referring to James Joyce and saying that ‘there can only be a reconciliation when there has been a sundering’. This sundering ‘is just a process of growth’, but necessary. A ‘writer has to … delineate himself from his background, so he can be in it distinctly’ (CDW, 88). As Walcott was to say in Tiepolo's Hound, ‘Separation only brings / sharper definition’ (TH, 99). However, the writer has to return home so that the cycle can be completed. Hemingway ‘would have been even greater had he come back [to America] to make the final link in the circle’.