21 pages • 42 minutes read
The Schooner Flight
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Literary Devices
Form & Meter
“The Schooner Flight” consists of 11 sections, each ranging from 9 to 77 lines. Metrically, the poem maintains a relatively consistent line length of roughly five 5 or 10 syllables, making the lines conform to the most common length in English verse, pentameter. While Walcott employs meter for emphasis and to create aurally evocative passages, the poem eschews any fixed metrical pattern.
Because of its length, use of dialect and vernacular, and lack of definitive meter, the poem may seem at first to be free verse. However, the text follows a loose pattern of end rhymes. While there are many variations, the poem continually falls back into an ABCB rhyme scheme. For example, the poem’s second stanza begins with lines that conclude on the following words: “things,” “Road,” “streets,” “load” (Lines 25, 26, 27, 28). Directly following these lines, however, are lines ending on the words “soul,” “bohbohl,” and “Creole” (Lines 30, 31, 32), following an AAA rhyme scheme that plays against the poem’s baseline rhyme scheme. Such variation is common throughout the 474-line poem, creating emphasis and never allowing the poem to slip into formulaic sing-song repetition.
Metaphor & Simile
As a long poem, “The Schooner Flight” contains innumerable poetic devices. The text is most distinguished, however, by its use of figurative language via metaphor and simile. Shabine first characterizes himself by saying “I was a dog on these streets” (Line 27), a textbook metaphor comparing two unlike things without the use of the words like or as. Only a handful of lines later, Walcott adds more animal imagery, with Shabine pining for his wife’s “brown eyes like a marmoset” (Line 59) and her “claws […] / like a crab on wet sand” (Lines 61-62). Each of these examples are typical similes with their use of like.
The poem’s metaphors and similes elevate the often-conversational persona poem into vivid literary language as well as deepen its meaning through the connotative force of their comparisons. For example, in the same section, Shabine watches “the rotting waves come / past the bow that scissor the sea like milk” (Lines 63-64). Aside from the vividness of imagery (augmented by the alliterative repetition of s and k sounds), Walcott uses the simile as a jumping off point to refer to Shabine’s family: “I swear to you all, by my mother’s milk” (Line 65). The “minister-monster” (Line 101) for whom Shabine smuggled scotch has a face described in grotesque detail, with the “stone lids” (Line 103) of his eyes “like a dinosaur caked with primordial ooze” (Line 104). This simile works both to make the inner ugliness of the man external and to emphasize the long history of oppression.
At other times, similes and metaphors reassert the poem’s oceanic motifs, as when “the shell of [Shabine’s] ears” (Line 113) rings with the sound of his wife and “the sea noise” (Line 112). Similarly, the marching “[y]oung men” (Line 175) of the “revolution” (Line 170) make noise that “ceased as foam sinks into sand” (Line 178) and “sank in the bright hills like rain” (Line 179). Even the earth itself is considered in aquatic terms, as when “this round world was some cranked water wheel” (Line 223) or “the earth is one / island in an archipelago’s of stars” (Lines 463-464). The poem concludes in metaphor, when the moonlight shines as a “road in white moonlight taking [Shabine] home” (Line 473).
Allusion
While many similarly lengthy 20th-century poems are rife with allusions to other texts, mythology, and philosophy, this poem is largely focused on the narrative at hand. However, while the poem perhaps uses allusion with a lighter touch than many of its peers, it is still seasoned with allusions that complicate the meaning of the text and expand its scope. Most notably, “Maria Concepcion” (Line 4) alludes to the Christian mother of Jesus. Maria is, of course, a Spanish language version of the English language Mary, while Concepcion is Spanish for conception (and often denotes specifically the Christian concept of the immaculate conception). This decidedly un-subtle allusion keeps the text in dialogue with Christianity far before Shabine’s turn toward orthodoxy in section 10.
The text contains other important allusions to Christian thought. For instance, section 10’s title, “Out of the Depths,” alludes to a famous passage in the Christian Old Testament. Psalm 130 opens with the line “Out of the depths have I cried unto thee, Oh Lord.” The allusion both infuses the section’s storm with even more spiritual significance than it already has, and it contextualizes Shabine’s internal struggles within a national narrative: Psalm 130 is a short poem expressing the psalmist’s despair and need for divine intervention, but this expresses a larger, national problem with the failings of the psalmist’s homeland, calling for Israel’s forgiveness. Shabine also experiences this storm as a personal, spiritual event that changes his complicated relationship to his homeland.
The poem contains more allusions than Biblical, however. The poem alludes to another long masterwork of the 20th century, T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. When Shabine declares, “I’m the drowned sailor in her Book of Dreams” (Line 398), it recalls “the drowned Phoenician Sailor” (Eliot, Line 47) illustrated on a tarot card. Shabine’s promise, “I shall scatter your lives like a handful of sand” (Line 368) also recalls the line “I will show you fear in a handful of dust” (Eliot, Line 30). These allusions situate the text within the 20th century tradition of long poems, playing off of Eliot’s symbolism to enrich Walcott’s narrative.
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By Derek Walcott
