The Schooner Flight by Derek Walcott
"The Schooner Flight" is a renowned poem by Derek Walcott, featured in his collection *The Star-Apple Kingdom* (1979). Spanning nearly five hundred lines and divided into eleven sections, the poem centers around the character Shabine, a complex figure who embodies the mixed heritage and identity struggles inherent in a colonial society. Shabine describes himself as a "red nigger" with roots in African, Dutch, and English ancestry, underscoring the intricacies of identity within postcolonial contexts. Throughout his journey across the Caribbean Sea, Shabine grapples with his personal history, societal corruption, and the allure of the ocean, which symbolizes both freedom and creative possibility.
The poem is influenced by classic works like Coleridge’s "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner," as both feature a protagonist on an oceanic journey of transformation. However, while Coleridge's mariner confronts transgressions against nature, Shabine's voyage focuses on historical and personal confrontations. Themes of identity, the pain of history, and the power of poetry permeate the narrative, with Shabine reflecting on his existence and the legacies of colonialism. Ultimately, "The Schooner Flight" culminates in a spiritual revelation, as Shabine reconciles his losses and attains a sense of unity with nature, embodying the transformative power of both the sea and storytelling.
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The Schooner Flight by Derek Walcott
Excerpted from an article in Magill’s Survey of World Literature, Revised Edition
First published: 1979 (collected in The Star-Apple Kingdom, 1979)
Type of work: Poem
The Work
“The Schooner Flight” appears in Walcott’s The Star-Apple Kingdom (1979). The poem is perhaps his most celebrated persona poem, as well as one of his most accomplished longer poems. Nearly five hundred lines long, the poem is divided into eleven sections of varying length. The poem’s main speaker and central figure is Shabine, who describes himself in the first section as “just a red nigger who love the sea, . . . I have Dutch, nigger, and English in me,/ and either I’m nobody, or I’m a nation.” This description fits Walcott, who, although of African descent, is also of English and Dutch ancestry. What Shabine underscores is the complex mix that defines an individual in a colonial society and defines the society itself. Nicknamed by his society, Shabine becomes an Everyman.
In this persona poem, Walcott creates a figure who is compelled to tell his story. In many ways, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1798) by the English Romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge is a precedent for Walcott’s poem. Both are dramatic monologues narrated by one who has ventured into the ocean and has undergone a transforming experience. Coleridge’s poem, however, explores the mariner’s transgressions against nature, whereas Walcott’s Shabine confronts history. Shabine is also an Odysseus. Like the Odyssey (c. 725 b.c.e.; English translation, 1614), the poem traces Shabine’s journey from island to island in the Caribbean Sea.
The first section, “Adios, Carenage,” is rich in image and detail of the island that Shabine leaves. Disgusted with the corrupt postcolonial politics, Shabine leaves on what is a quest of purification. The second section, “Raptures of the Deep,” describes Shabine’s past as a smuggler double-crossed by his employer, a corrupt official. Shabine then describes in phantasmagorical detail his work as a salvage diver. In the rapturous descriptions of the sea, Shabine reveals the enchantment that the sea has cast over him.
In both sections, Shabine is torn between the sea and his lover, Maria Concepcion. To stay with his lover is to remain confined to the island and not explore the ocean, which is the realm of potentiality and poetic imagination. At the end of the second section, in the throes of the rapture of the deep, Shabine sees God in the form of a harpooned grouper and hears a voice telling him to leave Maria. In the third section, “Shabine Leaves the Republic,” Shabine’s disgust with the politics of the Caribbean deepens, as does his despair over Maria.
The fourth section, “The Flight, Passing Blanchisseuse,” is a short but lyrical section describing a beach, “bare of all but light,” seen from the schooner; as night approaches, “dark hands start pulling in the seine/ of the dark sea, deep, deep inland.” This passage is typical of Walcott’s ability to create metaphors that work on a variety of levels: visual imagery, rhythmic melody, and juxtaposition of disparate phenomena. The image of the night being compared to the work of fishermen pulling in the seine net, itself a metaphor for the sea, creates a brief narrative or myth.
The fifth section, “Shabine Encounters the Middle Passage,” describes a hallucinatory vision of “a rustling forest of ships/ with sails dry like paper.” On the decks of these ghostly ships, he sees all the great admirals and hears the orders shouted to his ghostly counterparts. At the end of this section, he passes the slave ships from a variety of nations and knows that sequestered below their decks are his forebears, who cannot hear his shouts.
The sixth section, “The Sailor Sings Back to the Casuarinas,” is an orphic moment in the poem, where Shabine questions the nature of names. That, of course, is a central theme in the poem, beginning with the history of Shabine’s own name, the pun on Maria Concepcion’s name, and Shabine’s rhetorical question upon seeing the slave ships in the fifth section, “Who knows/ who his grandfather is, much less his name?” Looking at the graceful, wind-bent gray pines known variously as cedars, cypresses, and casuarinas, Shabine reflects that “we live like our names and you would have/ to be colonial to know the difference,/ to know the pain of history words contain.” Shabine reveals the full irony of such a homily when he quotes, “’if we live like the names our masters please,/ by careful mimicry might become men.’”
“The Flight Anchors in Castries Harbor,” the seventh section, introduces Shabine as poet. The next section, “Fight with the Crew,” depicts the crew mocking Shabine’s poetry and his fight to regain possession of his poetry notebook. Again, it is another manifestation of Shabine’s struggle to define himself. The ninth section, “Maria Concepcion and the Book of Dreams,” continues Shabine’s quest; this leg of his journey takes him from St. Lucia to Dominica. The section begins by describing the illusion of progress, which prompts Shabine’s historical memories and imagination to fuse in a vision of an escaping Carib running through the tropical forest. The section then turns to a vision of Maria Concepcion’s “Book of Dreams,” which prophesies an apocalyptic storm. This vision empowers Shabine, who states with almost biblical force, “I shall scatter your lives like a handful of sand,/ I who have no weapon but poetry and/ the lances of palms and the sea’s shining shield!”
The prophesied storm arrives in the tenth section, “Out of the Depths.” With the passage of the storm and the ensuing calm comes dispensation. In the eleventh and final section, “After the Storm,” Shabine has a vision of Maria marrying the ocean and drifting away. She has been figuratively swept away by the storm. Shabine transforms this loss into a form of spiritual compensation. After that moment, Shabine wants nothing, as he has attained a sense of wholeness or union with nature. The poem asserts a lyrical unity, where voice and creation are one: “Shabine sang to you from the depths of the sea.”
Bibliography
Baugh, Edward. Derek Walcott: Memory as Vision. London: Longman, 1978.
Breslin, Paul. “’I Met History Once, but He Ain’t Recognize Me’: The Poetry of Derek Walcott.” TriQuarterly 68 (Winter, 1987): 168-183.
Brodsky, Joseph. “The Sound of the Tide.” In Less than One: Selected Essays. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1986.
Hamner, Robert D. Derek Walcott. Boston: Twayne, 1981.
Hamner, Robert D., ed. Critical Perspectives on Derek Walcott. Washington, D.C.: Three Continents Press, 1993.
Jay, Paul. “Fated to Unoriginality: The Politics of Mimicry in Derek Walcott’s Omeros.” Callaloo 29, no. 2 (2006): 545-559.
McCorkle, James. “Re-Mapping the New World: The Recent Poetry of Derek Walcott.” Ariel: A Review of International English Literature 17 (April, 1986): 3-14.
Mason, David. “Derek Walcott: Poet of the New World.” Literary Review: An International Journal of Contemporary Writing 29 (Spring, 1986): 269-275.