I need help understanding the poem "prelude" by Derek walcott?

Interviewed by Charles H. Rowell in the Winter 1988 issue of Callaloo, Walcott spoke of “Prelude”: “I think I wrote that poem when I was probably sixteen or seventeen, somewhere during that time when I was very excited about my discovery, through several older people, of the poetry of W.H. Auden, T.S. Eliot, and Dylan Thomas—physical books that I had, books whose print I liked. So the sense of separation, which very often people writing about my work define, is not that early. It comes a little later. In other words, by 1947 or 1948, when we were boys at college, we felt that we were part of the heritage of the British Empire—its language, its history, and so on. We were quite aware of the fact that the background of the Caribbean was a background of slavery. But my generation was not schizophrenic about the heritage of the Empire and the heritage of the Caribbean. It was a double rather than a split thing. In other words, we had an interior life, the life of education.”