Sabbaths, WI

In “Sabbaths, W.I.,” Walcott gives the reader a sense of what it’s like to live in the West Indies through details about the environment and the people who live in it. He evokes landscape through descriptions of the land and sea. The island has “volcanoes like ashen roses” (Line 3). This simile compares something the reader might not have seen, volcanoes, to something they are likely to have seen: roses. One has to travel to specific locales, like the West Indies, to see volcanoes, whereas roses can be seen on bushes and in flower shops around the world. In the West Indies, there are many places where the land and sea interact. For instance, Walcott describes “gommiers peeling from sunburn still wrestling to escape the sea” (Line 11). Gommier refers to a kind of tree that grows in the Caribbean. The tree’s bark can peel like sunburn, and it grows near the sea. There is also a boat named after the gommier and made from its wood. This second meaning adds a human element—the humans that created the boat—to the sea.

Walcott also evokes setting through his descriptions of the local flora and fauna. The poem is filled with trees, including banana trees, cocoa trees, and sea almond trees.