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The Sea Is History Poem Analysis

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Derek Walcott, a great poet and playwright was born on the island of Saint Lucia which was a former British colony in the West Indies. The society that emerged in the Caribbean islands after decolonization was fragmented and had lost their own identity and history as it was ignored or suppressed by the colonizers and in order to maintain their hold, they had developed means which taught disrespect to their own age old means of life and in its place proclaimed their own. Poetry occupied an important place in Post-Colonial literature and the major themes they dealt with are exploitation, colonial history and memory, displacement, loss of history, exile and brutality etc. It stemmed from their deep rooted concerns and anxieties of people who …show more content…

“The Sea is History" is an outstanding work of art of the middle phase of Walcott’s poetry and presents to us the alternate history of the Caribbean and for it he traces its components from the unfathomable depths of the ocean. In this poem, Walcott delves deep into the conscious recesses of the Caribbean mythology, experience and its mind in order to dig out a tradition that lies buried, unacknowledged in the unfathomable depths of the ocean. Secondly, the poem is a direct probing into the subject of natural history, relating it to cultural context. It also laments the facelessness of the Caribbean being, its featurelessness, destined to the unproductive fate of subject people-who are not able to produce something new but they too have their encounters with destiny in the course of their experience, but it remained unseen and neglected and was given no significance. Walcott has used iconography in his poetry and in this poem also he has used the sea as a symbol. The sea is a reference to the changes that came with the passage of time. It also refers to those portions of African history that lie buried, ignored, suppressed and hidden from the human eyes that are no longer discussed by people, and given no significance. The sea is the

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