Sabbaths, WI

Walcott frequently personifies plants, animals, and other features of the landscape. In other words, he gives non-human things human, sentient attributes. For instance, the rivers “forgot the old music” (Line 13). Forgetting is a very human action, but Walcott uses it to describe a part of the environment. The river, whose “bed is made of broken bottles” (Line 7), is no longer able to remember the old songs. Modernity is represented by human pollution. The forgotten music is a cleaner world, perhaps before colonial settlers came to the West Indies.

Another example of forgetting is a bird that “has forgotten its flute” (Line 10). Walcott doesn’t name the specific kind of bird, as if he has forgotten its name. The poet’s failing to recall the bird’s name mirrors how the bird forgets its song. Walcott describes the song in colors, which are part of human language.

Walcott also personifies trees. The gommier tree is “peeling from sunburn” (Line 11). Walcott’s connection between peeling bark and peeling skin makes the tree seem more human. A more direct example of personification is “those herons like spinsters that doubted their reflections” (23). These birds are personified as old, unmarried women who look in mirrors and doubt what they see. Overall, Walcott’s personification highlights links between people and the place where they live.

Walcott uses repetition of both letters and words. Alliteration is repetition of the same first letter in several words. In the phrase “ferns that stamped their skeletons on the skin” (Line 19), the letter ‘s’ is repeated at the beginning of three words: “stamped,” “skeletons,” and “skin.” The letter ‘s’ appears many times throughout the poem, such as in the word Sunday. Sunday is repeated six times. This extends the alliteration and emphasizes the day of the week—the sabbath, which is also alliterative with Sunday. Another example of alliteration is: “old men sat / watching a white schooner stuck in the branches” (Lines 15-16). This couples the alliteration of the letter ‘s’ that appears in many lines of the poem with the alliteration of the letter ‘w.’ Both ‘s’ and ‘w’ are in the title of the poem: “Sabbaths, W.I.”

In addition to Sunday, the word “those” repeats throughout the poem. It is the first word of the poem and appears 13 more times after Line 1. Like the long lines of the poem, Walcott’s repetition of “those” echoes Walt Whitman’s repetition in “Song Of the Rolling Earth”: “A song of the rolling earth, and of words according, / Were you thinking that those were the words, those upright lines? / those curves, angles, dots? / No, those are not the words, the substantial words are in the ground and sea” (Lines 1-4). The repetition of “those” creates a list-like structure in the poetry of both Whitman and Walcott. Except for the first line, “Sundays” is always preceded by “those” in “Sabbaths, W.I.,” making it the only word repeated more times than “Sunday.” The word “those” also appears before the words: “villages,” “volcanoes,” “rivers,” “hillsides,” “ferns,” “roads,” “crabs,” “herons,” and “nettles.” Walcott links the different parts of the West Indies—humans, geography, flora, and fauna—together by repeating the word “those.”