In the world of the work—that is, within the context of the play itself—we are presented with a dream and a dream-within-a-dream. But in the context of the work within the world—that is, beyond the text or enactment of the drama—we are also confronted with a dream: Walcott's creative vision which informs the play, and which is itself a part of a larger dream in the mind of mankind, an edenic dream of elemental freedom. Beginning on a "realistic" level in the play we move rapidly into the realm of poetic reality, spiraling evermore inward toward an essential core of meaning before ascending once more to the "logic" of the waking world. But this essential core of meaning, discoverable by the individual through an internal voyage, exists beyond the individual—or any individual work of art—in a collective consciousness which Art as...