The Schooner Flight

Before the body of the poem even begins, the section title suggests the primary action initiating the narrative: “Adios, Carenage.” The poem quickly introduces its central character, Shabine, who is indeed bidding adios to his native Trinidadian town of Carenage, where his wife Maria Concepcion sleeps unknowing.

The first stanza anchors its action in colors. First, the unpeopled landscape is characterized by the “leaves of brown islands” (Line 2). Next, Shabine stands in his “yard turning gray in the dawn” (Line 6) before finally leaving his home and family behind. As the “route taxi” (Line 15) drives Shabine away, the protagonist in “the back seat […] watch[es] the sky burn / above Laventille pink” (Lines 19-20). Only once he begins leaving does Shabine see his Trinidadian home as colorful, as anything other than “brown” or “gray” (Lines 2, 6).

As Shabine leaves the island, he looks in the taxi’s “rearview [mirror] and see[s] a man / exactly like me, and the man was weeping / for the houses, the street, that whole fucking island” (Lines 22-24). This curious image accomplishes several things. First, it shows how Shabine’s desires are split; he is metaphorically leaving a part of himself behind. Next, the doppelgänger who “weep[s] / for […] that whole fucking island” for Walcott himself, and their similarity in appearance points to the close relationship between Shabine the poet. Finally, the mirrored and thus doubled nature of the image emphasizes Shabine’s story and his pain, deepening its significance by multiplying individual experiences into cyclical events.

Shabine cannot disconnect from the weeping part of himself that remains with his family. Instead, his wife “Maria Concepcion was all my thought” (Line 44) as he sets out to sea. It is not the idealized Maria “dressed in the sexless light of a seraph” (Line 58) that he misses; it is the embodied “round brown eye[d]” (Line 59) woman he cannot forget.

As Shabine departs on the “schooner Flight” (Line 76), the poem maintains its focus on the speaker’s conflicted sense of self, this time incorporating his racial background. First, the narrative returns to the beginning to “tell [the reader] how this business begin” (Line 77). Before fleeing his home, Shabine “[s]muggled Scotch for [a] big government man” (Line 78) to buy beautiful gifts for Maria. However, once the “whole racket crash” (Line 83), Shabine recognizes that it is not the official who will pay the price of the law, but himself, relegated by racism to a marginalized social position as a racially diverse “red n***** like you or me” (Line 90). Frustrated by this treatment, Shabine claims to “have seen things that would make a slave sick / in this Trinidad” (Lines 110-111). And with this reference to his Trinidadian home, the poem connects the thematic elements of race and identity to the elements of home and culture. These thematic elements weave into the next stanza and blend into the motif of the sea, another ever-present motif: With smuggling no longer an option, Shabine begins salvaging in the Caribbean “emerald water” (Line 117). As he dives deep into the sea, he also dives deep into the history of his home, finding “this Caribbean so choke with the dead” (Line 116) that he even “saw […] the dead men” (Lines 119-120). As he glimpses the carnage of generations unjustly killed beneath his home, the image is so disturbing that he stops diving for an entire month. Despite this, he is still smitten with the sea, “for her beauty had fallen on me like a sword” (Line 128).

The poem develops a sort of rivalry between Maria and the sea—at least insofar as both hold sway over Shabine’s heart. Maria is “[his] wife” (Line 125), while the sea is “[his] other woman” (Line 126). While Shabine describes the sea’s beauty as “cleaving me from my children” (Line 129), his longing for Maria is a pain worse than what the ocean can inflict, “worse than the bends” (Line 136). However, the deep sea manifests a vision of “God / like a harpooned grouper bleeding” (Lines 140-141); the vision, a personified presence, speaks to Shabine, saying “if you leave [Maria], I shall give you the morning star” (Line 143). This vision of the personified sea accentuates the tension between Shabine’s two loves: His love for both approaches the spiritual, connoted in no small part by Maria Concepcion’s Mariological name and by Shabine’s seemingly mystical experiences “[i]n the rapturous deep” (Line 136).

Just as Shabine is separated from his wife, is longing for his home while at sea, and is displaced from his native Trinidad, so he is also excluded socially and racially, having “no nation now but the imagination” (Line 151). His racially diverse status leaves him stuck in between communities: “the white man, [and] the n*****s didn’t want me” (Line 152); he “wasn’t black enough for their pride” (Line 155). Even when he confronts his white “parchment Creole” (Line 161) grandfather, the man only “sp[its]” (Line 167) at him after Shabine asks about his Black grandmother.

Deeper into the voyage on the Flight, the poem highlights the idea of history and a fraught, living past in which the speaker sees himself: In the early morning, the Flight “float[s] through a rustling forest of ships” (Line 208) peopled by ghosts of past sailors and “great admirals” (Line 215) from history. Shabine hears “the hoarse orders / [the admirals] gave those Shabines” (Line 216-217), identifying both with the racially diverse nature of the ghost sailors (he calls them by his own name) as well their socio-economic plight. Even after the burning sun turns the ships to “mist” (Line 227), the Flight encounters “slave ships […] / our fathers below deck to deep […] / to hear us shouting” (Lines 228-230). That these ships persist in the light of day shows that some of history’s violence is too substantial to fade even in the heat of the sun.

At times along the journey, Shabine stops to reflect on various destinations or objects they pass, conveying the poet’s mournful preoccupation with colonizing influences and their disruptive, intrusive effects. For example, a section of the poem is dedicated to the “casuarinas” (Line 241) trees on Barbados. The trees are called “Canadian cedars” (Line 240) or “cypresses” (Line 241), but this colonial naming practice erases their uniqueness; it demonstrates “the pain of history words contain” (Line 253). Because they evoke a conflicted cultural history, the trees indirectly remind the speaker of his own indeterminate experience of himself (in his Nobel speech, Walcott asserted his own identity was fragmentary). However, Shabine never completely loses a sense of himself or his origins—and Maria is an emotional link to those origins: The schooner’s stop in Castries, the capital city of Saint Lucia, reminds Shabine of being young, when he “loved [Maria] alone and […] loved the whole world” (Line 261). Here, he dedicates himself to “leave [Maria] the one thing [he] own[s] / : my poetry” (Lines 269-270).

The poem increasingly focuses on Shabine’s relationship to his own writing as a source of redeemed identity. In section 8, the cook steals the “exercise book” (Line 276) that Shabine uses for poetry writing. To ensure that “none of them go fuck with my poetry again” (Line 294), Shabine attacks the cook and uses a knife that “move like a flying fish” (287)—echoing Shabine’s relationship to the sea—and that makes the cook “turn more white / than he thought he was” (Lines 289-290). These lines emphasize the continual racial tensions in Shabine’s encounters.

As the Flight’s journey continues, Shabine reflects on the violent nature of the Western concept of progress: “Progress is something to ask Caribs about” (Line 305), Shabine says, “They kill them by millions, some in war, / some by forced labor dying in the mines” (Lines 306-307). For Shabine, progress is a colonial vehicle of violence, and until he observes a concrete change in humanity, he will consider progress only “history’s dirty joke” (Line 311). This reflection inspires Shabine to dream of running “like a Carib through Dominica” (Line 317). After waking, he remembers his wife’s “Book of Dreams” (Line 336)—but while Maria’s treasured book is purported to interpret dreams, Shabine cannot recall a time when it helped. Certain fundamental mysteries are beyond unraveling. Like when Shabine “got raptures once, and […] saw God” (Line 140) in the Caribbean depths, so even his dreams face the poet and sailor as insurmountable enigmas.

All of Shabine’s reflections are interrupted by an approaching great storm—the long poem’s last and most vivid narrative event. The “black-mane squall” (Line 183) is so terrible that the Flight’s sailors urge Shabine to “say your prayers, if life leave you any” (Line 390). Faced with what seems like imminent death, the protagonist mourns that he’s failed to adequately love the cherished people in his life. In his fear, Shabine remembers all the mysteries he has seen, from “ghost ships” (Line 399) to a “bed of sea-worms, fathom past fathom” (Line 400). Despite all the horrors and wonders, he discovers that “only one thing / hold me […] my family safe home” (Line 402). This dire moment emphatically highlights the idea of home and origins, which relate to the theme of identity.

In a curious turn, Shabine finds renewed meaning not only in the family he left behind but also in traditional religion. In his fear of death, Shabine declares that “I am from a backward people who still fear God” (Lines 403-404). Despite showing active disinterest in Christianity earlier in the poem, Shabine finds renewed belief in the religion of his childhood, in “the faith / that had fade from a child in the Methodist chapel” (Lines 407-408). Having turned his fear into faith, even the ship’s captain seems to “hold fast / to that wheel, man, like the cross held Jesus” (Lines 416-417).

In the calm after the storm, Shabine finds peace in his own inner landscape. He sees “the veiled face of Maria Concepcion / marrying the ocean, then drifting away / […] till she was gone” (Lines 426, 427, 430). Here, Shabine’s two loves are joined together. Instead of pining for his far away wife, he finds his desire for her joined to his love for the sea and so frees himself of longing. His once pressing and painful longings are so culled that he “wanted nothing after that day” (Line 431).

Shabine’s hopelessness toward—and sense of alienation from—his homeland has also transformed into love. He “bless[es] every town” (Line 450) of the islands, “satisfied / if [his] hand gave voice to one people’s grief” (Lines 444-445). At the poem’s conclusion, the protagonist speaks directly to his audience, saying he has “only one theme: / […] vain search for an island that heals with its harbor” (Lines 453, 456). Shabine’s spirit is always searching, always voyaging for an island that doesn’t exist. However, rather than framing this as futility, the poem communicates the urge positively: “There are so many islands […] / As many islands as the stars at night” (Lines 458-459). Even the world itself is merely “one / island in archipelagoes of stars” (Lines 463-464), highlighting the boundless wonders which a restless sailor’s dream may uncover.

Just as the poem began with drab colors that blossomed into the vivid colors of dawn, so the poem concludes with color. Now, though, everything is washed to a pale and tranquil white: “the deck turn white” (Line 471), and there is an illuminated “road in white moonlight” (Line 473). While the poem’s narrative seems to end unresolved, Shabine himself finds resolution. He does not return to his wife or family but makes peace with his abandonment in his own heart. Although he does find peace, he still must work to “forget what happiness was” (Line 468), with the after-storm calm leaving Shabine as passionless as he is tranquil. All that is left to him is to “s[i]ng to you from the depths of the sea” (Line 474).