I am just a red nigger who love the sea,

I had a sound colonial education,

I have Dutch, nigger, and English in me,
and either I’m nobody, or I’m a nation. (4)

3 Shabine Leaves the Republic

I had no nation now but the imagination.

After the white man, the niggers didn’t want me
when the power swing to their side.
The first chain my hands and apologized, “History”;
the next said I wasn’t black enough for their pride. (8)
 The Schooner Flight

 Thematics  Poetics
Caribbean Identity Historical poem
Love & loss First-person poem
History Song of self
5 Shabine Encounters the Middle Song of survival
Passage Poem of the sea
9 Maria Concepcion and the Book of Travel poem
Dreams
Quest poem
Political Corruption
Elegy
2 Raptures of the Deep
for lost love, lost homeland
Geography & Natural History
Prophetic poem
The Sea
Political poem
Travel
Ethnic-relations poem
Poetry
State-of-the-nation
 Dynamics
 Narrative planes (factual, mythic,
imaginative)
 Spatiality
 Temporality
 Syntactic variation
 Grammar
 Reference (I/Others)
 Rhythm, Metre & Rhyme
 Sound
 Narrative Planes

Fact Myth(Biblical, Greek,

Slavery Caribbean)
Carib resistance
Maria Concepcion as Virgin
Mary/goddess/guide/ fortune
teller/siren

Storm at sea 10 Out of the Depths-- “Let

Him, in His might, heave
Leviathan upward”
 Imagination

 “Next we pass slave ships. Flags of all nations,/

our fathers below deck too deep, I suppose,/to
hear us shouting.”
 “I ran like a Carib through Dominica,/my nose
holes choked with memory of smoke;/I heard the
screams of my burning children,”
 Maria Concepcion as island, as Caribbean--11
After the Storm-- “I saw the veiled face of Maria
Concepcion/ marrying the ocean, then drifting
away/ in the widening lace of her bridal train”
 Temporality & Spatiality

 Does the poem take place over time,

and if so, how many episodes does it
show?
 Does the poem bring in several different
places/spaces?
 Does the poem refer to a time in the
historical past? If so, what does that
epoch mean to the speaker?
 Temporality & Spatiality

 How is the chaos of history ordered into

the brief space of a lyric?
 Does the poem move from space to
space as it goes along, or does it remain
in one place?
 If the poem treats imagined spaces, how
are those spaces laid out and
demarcated?
 Works Cited and
Consulted
 Handley, George B. New World Poetics:
Nature and the Adamic Imagination of
Whitman, Neruda, and Walcott. Athens:
University of Georgia Press, 2007.
 Ismond, Patricia. Abandoning Dead
Metaphors: The Caribbean Phase of
Derek Walcott’s Poetry. Kingston,
Jamaica: UWI Press, 2001.
 Works Cited and
Consulted
 Walcott, Derek. “What the Twilight
Says.” Dream on Monkey Mountain
and Other Plays. New York: Farrar,
Straus & Giroux, 1970.
 Additional Resources
 Brown, Stewart, and Mark McWatt.
The Oxford Book of Caribbean
Verse. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2005.
 Brogan, T. V. F. The New Princeton
Handbook of Poetic Terms.
Princeton: Princeton UP, 1994.
 Resources cont.
 ___________. The Princeton Handbook of
Multicultural Poetries. Princeton: Princeton
 UP, 1996.
 Caplan, David. Poetic Form: An Introduction.
New York: Pearson Longman, 2006.
 Eagleton, Terry. How to Read a Poem. Malden,
MA: Blackwell, 2007.
 Resources Cont.
 Fussell, Paul. Poetic Meter and Poetic Form.
Rev. ed. New York: Random House, 1979.
 Hollander, John. Rhyme’s Reason. New
Haven: Yale UP, 1981.
 Myers, Jack, and Don C. Wukasch. Dictionary
of Poetic Terms. Denton: University of North
Texas Press, 2003.
 Resources cont.
 Oliver, Mary. A Poetry Handbook. San
Diego, CA: Harcourt Brace, 1994.
 Pinsky, Robert. The Sounds of Poetry: A
Brief Guide. New York: Farrar, Straus and
Giroux, 1998.
 Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and
Poetics. Rpt. Ed. Alex Preminger et al.
Princeton: Princeton UP, 1993.
 Resources cont.
 Ramazani, Jahan. The Hybrid Muse:
Postcolonial Poetry in English. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2001.
 Ramazani, Jahan, Richard Ellmann, and
Robert O’Clair. The Norton Anthology of
Modern and Contemporary Poetry. 3rd ed.
New York: Norton, 2003.
 Resources cont.
 Strand, Mark, and Eavan Boland. The Making
of a Poem: A Norton Anthology of Poetic
Forms. New York: Norton, 2000.
 Vendler, Helen. Poems, Poets, Poetry: An
Introduction and Anthology. 2nd ed. Boston:
Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2002.