The Schooner Flight

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1979

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Summary

Background

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Background

Biographical Context: “Poet Versus Persona”

Much scholarship surrounds the blurred lines between the poem’s central character, Shabine, and Walcott himself. To understand the links between poet and persona, it is necessary to examine their overlapping biographical details. While Shabine is from Trinidad, Walcott was born and raised in a nearby West Indies island, Saint Lucia. Walcott was raised in the island’s capital city of Castries, which appears in section 7 of the poem, “The Flight Anchors in Castries Harbor.” With Walcott’s youth in mind, the nostalgia that infuses the opening lines resonates even more powerfully: “When the stars self were young over Castries / I loved you alone and I loved the whole world” (Lines 60-61).

Walcott was born with English, Dutch, and African heritage, putting him in the socially complex plight of a racially diverse Carib. The poem explores this same plight through Shabine’s complicated and shifting relationship with his background. Shabine even shares the same ethnic ancestry, as he declares “I have Dutch, n*****, and English in me / and either I’m nobody, or I’m a nation” (Lines 42-43). Many similarities between Walcott and Shabine proceed from this shared plight of ethnic liminality in Caribbean island culture. Additionally both are passionate poets who write about this situation.

Finally, while the islands in the West Indies are predominantly Catholic, Walcott was raised as part of a small minority of Methodists. In fact, Walcott’s mother was a teacher at the local Methodist elementary school from which Walcott graduated. When Shabine rediscovers his Christian background, it is not Catholicism but his childhood “Methodist chapel / in Chisel Street, Castries” (Lines 408-409) that captures his imagination. That he grew up Methodist is unusual enough, but that his childhood church was located in Castries, the city of Walcott’s upbringing, strongly links poet and persona.

Historical Context: “Colonial Violence”

The history of the Caribbean islands is long, complicated, and bloody, and this historical violence is a crucial backdrop to “The Schooner Flight.” Before the arrival of European powers and the attention of the colonial West, the native peoples of the Caribbean islands had flourishing communities, art, and agriculture for thousands of years. After Christopher Columbus first made European contact with these peoples, and Europe discovered their wealth of gold, the Spanish claimed the entire area (in the 15th century) and began importing kidnapped African peoples they forced into slave labor to search for more wealth.

In the following centuries (16th to 19th), in the wake of the declining power of the Spanish empire, other European countries began to vie for control of Caribbean islands. The numerous power struggles and wars that resulted from these conflicts defined much of the islands’ history for the hundreds of years leading up to the 20th century. The French, Dutch, and English all laid claim to parts of the Caribbean, and the resulting turf wars, wars of religion, and imported European diseases led to widespread death. Additionally, the other European countries also captured, enslaved, and imported millions of African people to exploit for labor. It is on the backs of all these enslaved and killed peoples that Shabine finds himself. It is their ghosts he sees sailing phantom ships, and their bones he finds ground to powdery sand under the sea.