 Castaway by Derek Walcott

The starved eye devours the seascape for the morsel

Of a sail.
The horizon threads it infinitely.

Action breeds frenzy. I lie,

Sailing the ribbed shadow of a palm,
Afraid lest my own footprints multiply.

Blowing sand, thin as smoke,

Bored, shifts its dunes.
The surf tires of its castles like a child.

The salt green vine with yellow trumpet-flower,

A net, inches across nothing.
Nothing: the rage with which the sandfly's head is filled.

Pleasures of an old man:

Morning: contemplative evacuation, considering
The dried leaf, nature's plan.

In the sun, the dog's feces

Crusts, whitens like coral.
We end in earth, from earth began.
In our own entrails, genesis.

If I listen I can hear the polyp build,

The silence thwanged by two waves of the sea.
Cracking a sea-louse, I make thunder split.

Godlike, annihilating godhead, art

And self, I abandon
Dead metaphors: the almond's leaf-like heart,

The ripe brain rotting like a yellow nut

Hatching
Its babel of sea-lice, sandfly, and maggot,

That green wine bottle's gospel choked with sand,

Labelled, a wrecked ship,
Clenched sea-wood nailed and white as a man's hand.

Themes: Hope, Despair, Lost identity, Diaspora

Castaway is an astonishingly unusual and gripping poem. An old man is a sole castaway on a
small and unfriendly island. His only hope is for rescue, but this hope seems bleak.
Castaway can be defined in three ways. Firstly, castaway can refer to something that has been
thrown away or rejected. Secondly, it refers to being ashore as a survivor of a shipwreck.
Lastly, it means being left without friends or resources.
In the beginning we sense the distress of the person as he searches desperately for signs of
human life and the hope of being saved, which is clear by the use of the metaphor “the starved
eye devours”. This shows how hungrily and anxiously his eyes moved around the island and
across the sea to find salvation.

The person continues by saying “the horizon threads it infinitely,” it refers to the sea and the
horizon is where the sky meets the sea. The word infinitely highlights to the reader that nothing
could be seen in the distance and that the person would never be rescued.

The third stanza depicts a sense of hallucination and hysteria in the person. The term “footprints
multiply” suggests that he is not alone on the island or that he forgets that he is alone.
The fourth and fifth stanzas continue to describe what the person sees and is experiencing on the
island. He sees the sand as smoke, pictures the waves building and breaking down castles, sees
the seaweed being pulled back and forth by the movement of the waves and describe the ever
present “nothing” as rage. This imagery of death pervades.

Stanza eight emphasizes the idea of silence in the poem and mirrors stanza five where the poet
describes a pervasive nothingness. The person is listening carefully; he hears every wave break
when it hits the shore and in that moment he is responsible for something that shatters the
silence, “I make thunder split.”

Biblical references: The person refers to biblical imagery for he is now “Godlike, annihilating
godhead, art and self…” He is God, but he dismisses this idea, dismisses art and forgoes himself.
He abandons all that gives hope and purpose. To the person now, there is no spiritual solace to
find. This acts as a foreshadowing of the notion that the person will not be saved. The use of the
word “babel” proves to be another biblical reference, where God caused the people to speak
different languages and thus they could not understand each other.

The remaining two stanzas of the poem give the imagery of death and a sense of despair for not
only the person but the reader. The idea of “the ripe brain rotting” could refer to the creative
mind of the person that is wasting away because of its lack of use and the fact he has no one to
appreciate his work. The last line of the poem is having the imagery of Christ being crucified
on the cross and thus presents the idea of Jesus as a castaway similar to the person.

All these techniques employed by Walcott in the poem emphasize the unpleasant nature of being
castaway and shows that companionship is necessary to daily life.
Walcott's loyalty to both his English and his African backgrounds provides the major tension of
his work. His written language is split between literary English in the poems and island patois in
the plays, though in later efforts the two styles have tended to merge into one that uses more
natural speech and rhythm patterns, and a more direct, open mode of expression.

Walcott believes that his mixed heritage has enabled him to put personal experiences into
universal contexts. Because of this, he is both at home and displaced wherever he goes.