This quest poem fuses Derek Walcott’s highly metaphoric style with distinctly Caribbean Creole speech patterns. The narrator, a poet/sailor named Shabine, speaks English Creole, declaring, “Well, when I write / this poem, each phrase go be soaked in salt.”

This use of English Creole marks a shift in Walcott’s poetic practice. In his early poetry, Walcott’s poetics echoed the modernist style of W. B. Yeats, T. S. Eliot, and W. H. Auden and stood in contrast to that of Edward Kamau Brathwaite, among others, who sought to create a poetics based on the Caribbean folk tradition.

With The Schooner Flight, however, Walcott combines traditional English versification, such as iambic pentameter, with a distinctly Caribbean voice. Shabine, like Walcott, has mixed racial ancestry and consequently feels alienated in Trinidad following the failed Black Power revolution of 1970: “I have Dutch, nigger, and English in me / and either I’m nobody or I’m a nation.”

The poem begins with Shabine taking work on the schooner Flight to escape his self-destructive relationship with his mistress, Maria Concepcion, and the government officials for whom he has been smuggling liquor. Walcott echoes the opening of the medieval religious allegory Piers Plowman, “In summer season, when soft was the sun,” with the first line, “In idle August, while the sea soft.”

This allusion signals that Shabine’s journey has spiritual as well as physical dimensions. His experience is simultaneously an individual quest for identity and peace and the collective project of founding a Caribbean culture not deformed by corrupt government practices or the legacy of colonialism.

In the 11 parts of the poem, Shabine witnesses both the beauty and the pain intrinsic to Caribbean life. He sees fishermen living in harmony with nature as they pull their nets from the sea at sunset. He also meets his white grandfather, who refuses to acknowledge him. Along with this personal slight connected to colonial racism, Shabine experiences the communal pain inflicted by colonial history.

While sailing through fog, Shabine sees the ghosts of the Middle Passage, and off the coast of Dominica he witnesses the extermination of the Carib Indians in a visionary dream. Finally, he faces death when a storm threatens to drown the schooner. This crisis of the natural world enables him to acknowledge his faith in God and the healing power of the Caribbean natural world: after the storm the sea is compared to paradise.

Shabine finds peace in achieving the artistic representation of Caribbean culture: “I am satisfied / if my hand gave voice to one people’s grief.” The Schooner Flight ends with the image of spiritual renewal found in the beauty of nature, which Walcott’s poetry suggests is available to all who live in the Caribbean.

Bibliography
Breslin, Paul. Nobody’s Nation: Reading Derek Walcott. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001.
Hamner, Robert D., ed. Critical Perspectives on Derek Walcott. Washington, D.C.: Three Continents Press, 1993.
Walcott, Derek. “The Schooner Flight.” In Collected Poems 1948–84. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1986.

Categories: Caribbean Literature, Literature, World Literature

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