By Logan Monteleone ’26

Contributor Biography: Logan is the News editor for The Elm and a peer writing tutor at the Writing Center.

Brief Description: This analysis of the 1981 poem “The Fortunate Traveller” by St. Lucian writer Derek Walcott considers how vision and voice function as literary devices that enable the speaker to reckon with injustice through poetry.

The following was written for ENG336: Postcolonial Literature  

Creating and sustaining the perspective of a first-person traveler, St. Lucian poet Derek Walcott uses his speaker in “The Fortunate Traveller” (1981) to grapple with famine and the consequences and continuities of colonialism. The poem’s epigraph from a section of the Bible, wherein “a voice in the midst of the four beasts,” identifies the shortage of food and yet the abundance of wine and oil remains central to the 208-lined lyric. Images connected to human suffering and the struggle between empathy and indifference further themes introduced by the epigraph. In “The Fortunate Traveller,” vision acts not only as a physical process but as a metaphor for awareness, while voice functions as the medium for claiming selfhood in a fractured world; voice and vision together enable the speaker to reckon with injustice in both the perceived external world and in the internal moral world of the poem.  

While pointedly criticizing imperialism’s role in causing poverty and famine throughout the Global South, the speaker also thinks critically about himself in recognizing his own lack of empathy as a witness to suffering, and his self-reflection is often provoked by visuality. The final stanza of the first section begins with the straightforward narrativity of the speaker “Leaning on the hot rail, watching the hot sea” before seeing “far off” an abstract scene of a conquistador kneeling on Florida (lines 111-115). The speaker cannot literally see a massive Juan Ponce de León crushing a geopolitical region, and so by visualizing the historical reality of colonialism, the speaker demonstrates an awareness of the continuity of past injustices that continually malform into present sufferings.  Despite the active voice of the poem, the first-person ‘I’ is only able to articulate what it is that he observes and ignores. Before specifying that he has arrived at “the islands” (116) and later the St. Lucian village of Canaries, the speaker describes his new travel location as “where the phantoms live” (118). The mention of phantoms suggests the haunting of the legacy of colonialism in the village. The speaker asserts: “I have no fear of phantoms, but of the real” (Walcott line 117). The lack of definability from the first three lines in the start of the second section prevents the reader stepping too quickly into the first-person claim that “the real” is more frightening than the imagined. The line is end-stopped and surrounded by two other end-stopped lines before the pace of the stanza returns to a less stunted progression through thought. By distinguishing the abstraction of historic or distant suffering from the daily lived experience in a recently decolonized (or, depending on exactly when Walcott wrote the poem that was published in his 1981 collection, an actively-resisting) nation, Walcott makes a point about the continuous impacts of colonialism, as a nation’s independence does not mark the end of imperialism’s consequences. As it is contrasted with the phantasmal, reality or “the real” becomes a moment constantly re-defined by the context of the speaker or the reader at any given moment.  

Metaphor allows Walcott to both sustain the character of his speaker and to surround his own assertions as poet with vivid imagery. Instead of directly expressing the idea that European travelers choose not to see or care about the suffering their nations have caused in colonized and formerly-colonized nations, Walcott’s speaker floods readers with bizarre visions of flour clouds, weevil jets, and birds’ nests that are all then “condens[ed] to zero” (47). On The New Yorker Poetry Podcast, Ghanian poet Kwame Dawes compares Walcott to Shakespeare in his ability to create and sustain abiding yet transforming extended metaphors. Similar to Dawes’s note that Shakespeare’s can “begin with a shoe and [end] with a sword” without mixing metaphors or losing his motif, the podcast host Kevin Young says Walcott has the same power to “take a thing and turn it into another,” (12:55 – 13:36). The motif that Walcott continually reshapes in “The Fortunate Traveller” is of famine, as set-up by the epigraph and as presented in recurring images of grain, insects, teeth, and natural elements like fire and water. For instance, the sweat on the brow [“Black faces sprinkled with continual dew” (line 129)] becomes the dew on plum trees and elephant ears (lines 131-132), which becomes the Congo [that “…wrinkles downriver from the Heart of Darkness,” (line 135)], which becomes the weeping of trees that represent the dichotomy of a merciful God who does not stop the world’s suffering [“Think of a God who doesn’t loose His sleep / if trees burst into tears or glaciers weep,” (lines 144-145)] but continues re-becoming. This transformation is related to the vision of the speaker, as the type of metaphoric envisioning he displays is enabled by the combination of what is observed and what scenes the mind makes to accompany the knowledge of suffering. The speaker’s lack of a coherent response to the injustices in a postcolonial world where formerly-colonized nations are left under-resourced (a penny for a measure of wheat) while the colonizers have the leisure to travel (the oil and the wine untouched) is complicated by his emotional responses that are made into metaphors that lack a narrative mobility in the poem.  

Vision as a physical process informs the source of the speaker’s emotions and of Walcott’s metaphors elsewhere throughout the poem. The eye of the traveler is compared to a “telescope reversed,” giving the eye the ability to “swiftly screw down the individual sorrow” (lines 43-44). The unique image of a backward-facing telescope emphasizes the taking-in of observations rather than the act of looking outward, as if the world will make itself known no matter how one of a certain privilege tries to avoid confronting its injustices and cruelties. Further, the eye’s “screw[ing] down” of individual sadness shows not a focusing-in but instead a forcing out-of-sight of human pain. The traveler is unwilling to think of people or places in detailed, humanizing terms, instead preferring to ignore individually lived realities by visualizing a generalized collective, imagining a blur reduced to “antic numerals” that are less likely to provoke empathy, guilt, or grief. Whether or not the speaker has seen a starving child or can only imagine the massive collective of children globally who are hungry, the image of children “pounc[ing] / on green meat with a rat’s ferocity” (lines 89-90) is what his mind creates. Returning to what evokes sympathy in the traveler, to declare that “we cared less for one human face / than for the scrolls in Alexandria’s ashes” (180-181) suggests care comes from creating value after observation. As in, the sight of a human face –– presumably one of a person of color in a colonized nation affected by hunger –– is less cause for emotion and concern to European travelers than the imagined scene, the historical abstraction of unknown and since-gone papers burning in a library they have never seen. 

The difference between what the speaker physically sees (or at least seems to before the moment is potentially shifted into the surreal and metaphoric) and what the speaker imagines suggests a desire for a world that is not the same as the one most often perceived; the one haunting with phantoms, with the visible, and with the real. The grotesque metaphors that Walcott creates in stretches of the poem where the speaker’s voice is hard to find–– the third and fourth stanza having only two first-person self-references –– submerge the reader in the speaker’s interiority, as claimed at the start of the section after the early line “There is no sea as restless as my mind” (151). The speaker says: “I envisaged an Africa flooded with such light” (75) and he imagines a surreal burst of fertility in the Sahara. The shockingly intense image in the speaker’s mind of the starving children (89-90) causes an apostrophic outcry of “ah, Justice!” (170). Although seemingly just a reflection of Walcott’s adherence to a lyrical tradition, the capitalization of justice marks the only improper noun that is made proper in the poem, giving justice a unique significance in a poem that largely circles around the lack thereof. Making justice a proper noun suggests a respect for and belief in the possibility of justice, and yet the context of the word in an expression of frustration shows that it remains unachieved. After lamenting aloud the injustice in the world–– the world that allows European travelers to remain ignorantly well-fed and well-entertained and lets children of African descent starve and suffer unnoticed–– the speaker reflects that “everywhere that earth shows its rib cage / and the moon goggles with the eyes of children, / we turn away…” (174-176).  The seeming irony of detesting injustice and yet turning away from it is one that Walcott translates from reality and depicts in his hybrid speaker, who has the ‘fortune’ of travelling and the privilege of being able to continue moving despite the suffering he sees.  

The speaker of the poet-traveler himself is what literary scholar Jeffrey Grey describes as one of Walcott’s countless “metaphors for conflicted identity, creoles, the subject poisoned by, gifted by, caught between, or shuttling between two worlds” (Gray 117). Walcott’s poems demonstrate a “turning so strongly to metaphor that its ground in the world slips away” (Gray 126); that the perceived and the experienced, the past and the lived visible moment combine. Gray criticizes the permissibility of a European “going South for inspiration, escape, and pleasure” when the “Caribbean poet’s situation continues to be constrained to the commitment of fidelity to island realities,” a constraint which Gray argues has been “interiorized” in Walcott’s poems. The fact that the speaker seems to leave a scene before he can represent or respond to it, as indicated by a break in a section or a descent into abstraction and metaphor, reinforces Gray’s assertion that Walcott refuses to be a conveyor of reality. Instead, Walcott seeks to portray the internal experience created by interaction with reality. The movement in Walcott’s poem, Gray argues, is a “flight toward an expression unencumbered by the dammed to witness, a flight from the political to the personal, from the collective to the individual” (126), where a tense, internal dialogue about reckoning with the burden of representation and the poetic urge to create a metaphoric reality takes place (126).  

Walcott is caught in a paradox by the burden of representation, or the expectation that a writer perceived by the Western canon as “ethnic” represent an entire region or people, as Gray explains that Walcott’s announcement of “his unwillingness to recover historical tragedy compels him to acknowledge that tragedy” in his work (123), as the speaker of “The Fortunate Traveller” does–– acknowledges, notices, and engage with but makes no effort to alter, assume, or unearth. Noting that the idea is often introduced by other voices, like the voices of the speaker’s correspondents, Gray identifies a poetic irony in Walcott’s idea that “craft is at odds with ‘faithful’ representation.’” (125) The world as Walcott’s poetic eye perceives it is not the real one before him. Despite his ability to identify the “real” sufferings in his world, Walcott chooses to engage in the poetic creation of vague metaphors like that of the phantom to convey reality. Focusing on Walcott’s aesthetic and intellectual play in his work, Gray identifies Walcott’s use of “world-as-text metaphors” in the process of perceiving the world to the process of writing, and positions Walcott’s poems as “an inquiry into the relation between reality and representation” (125). 

Voice and vision combine in the few moments in “The Fortunate Traveller” where the speaker reads letters sent to him by people in his life that describe different scenes or that allow the speaker to be in one place and to speak to voices in another. In addition to providing narrative material to reinforce that the speaker is a traveler, there is an incredible intimacy in these moments, as they not only provide the names of friends to a nameless figure, but also show how the speaker interacts with his personal, immediate world amid the poem’s larger focus on the speaker’s interaction with a world he cannot comprehend. The speaker identifies himself as somewhere in solitude, whether it is sitting in the English rain watching Margo’s letter “disfigure…like mascara” (58-68) or on an empty St. Lucian beach while reading a poem sent him by Phillipe (187-196). Similar to the outcry of “ah, Justice!” (170), the speaker provides no detail of his correspondence with Magro, humanizing himself to the reader who cannot ‘find’ him by maintaining his intimacy with his letter-writer. The speaker only anaphorically says “Margo, / I cannot bear to watch the nations cry” (60-61). In this expression, visuality in the watching of nations, metaphor in the personification of nation-states, and vocality and intimacy in the cry of Margo’s name work together to create a complex interweaving of grief, awareness, passivity, indifference, and selfhood. 

Works Cited 

Dawes, Kwame. “Kwame Dawes Reads Derek Walcott.” The New Yorker Poetry Podcast, 26  February 2019, https://www.wnyc.org/story/kwame-dawes-reads-derek-walcott/. 

Gray, Jeffrey. “Walcott’s Traveler and the Problem of Witness,” Callaloo, vol. 28, no. 1, Winter  2005, pp, 117-128. John’s Hopkins University Press, https://www.jstor.org/stable 

/3805535. 

Walcott, Derek. “The Fortunate Traveller,” 1981, reprinted in The Longman Anthology of British  Literature: Fourth Edition, Volume 2c, The Twentieth Century and Beyond, Longman,  an imprint of Pearson, 1999, pp. 2264-2269.