Summary
"Map of the New World" is divided into three parts. In the first, “Archipelagoes,” Walcott compares the poem to an archipelago, or series of islands. The opening sentence becomes a ship voyaging into a patch of rain over the sea. In the mist, the ship/poem loses sight not only of islands, but of the possibility of ever finding a place to land.
This loss of safe harbor leads to a comparison to the Odyssey, the Greek epic in which Odysseus takes ten years to find his way back home after the end of the war in Troy. By the time Odysseus gets home, the beautiful Helen, for whom the war began, has grown old, while Troy itself is nothing but an “ashpit” by the sea. The rain over the sea transforms into the strings of a harp, the strings which Homer uses to sing out the story of the Odyssey.
The second section, “The Cove,” begins with an allusion to “the legend of Yseult,” most likely a different spelling of Isolde from "Tristan and Isolde," a medieval legend. The sound of the sea tells of this famous story, while the speaker is tucked secretly within the ship/poem. He is now returning to a shore of white sand, and needs to conceal himself to avoid fierce guards. The second stanza of the section finds him still in danger, but also able to relish both sea and book “far from the curse of government by race.”
The third section, “Sea Cranes,” concerns poetry more explicitly. The first stanza begins by stating that poetry depends on the existence of wild animals, but goes on to suggest that many modes of poetry are most deeply intertwined with work, in which domesticated animals take part. The next stanza shifts to describe a burnt island, suggesting destruction, but this burning is followed by light.
In the next stanza, that light fades into dusk, and “magnificent frigates,” an ambiguous noun that could refer either to warships or birds, appear to mark the end of the day. The light of dusk goes on to pass through the “tails of horses” and settles in stars from “the hammered anvil.” The poem ends with a plea from the speaker, who asks the ocean to take the wandering, seafaring poet described at the beginning of the poem and bring him to the place of anvils, frigates, and horses described at the end.
Analysis
Like many of Walcott’s poems, "Map of the New World" is deeply concerned with the aftermath of the British colonization of St. Lucia, and the relationship between the historical legacy of colonization, and the practice of writing poetry in English. When this poem was written in 1981, St. Lucia had just achieved liberation following a ten-year-long war for independence, after centuries of colonization. The profound sense of loss and wandering which permeates “Map of the New World” is informed by this reality. What does it mean to be St. Lucian, now that the war has finally been won?
Beyond this immediate historical context, the title of the poem calls into question broader colonial dynamics. By referencing “the New World,” Walcott invokes the Eurocentric idea that Europeans “discovered” the Americas. This discovery narrative functioned to obscure the existence of the indigenous people already living in the Americas, an erasure that justified settler colonialism and genocide.
In the case of St. Lucia, nearly all of the indigenous people were killed by the invading British force, who then built up an economy that relied on enslaved Africans as well as immigrants from the British colonies in India. As a native St. Lucian, Walcott must reckon with this fundamental loss of place: the ancient land of St. Lucia encoded as “new” through the same forces of colonization that rendered him a diasporic subject, or person far from their place(s) of origin.
Walcott begins to reckon with this difficult position by thinking about poetry. In “Archipelagos,” the poet begins by using metaphor to compare the poem to a ship at sea. Upon embarking on the project of trying to write about his world, he finds himself in a rainstorm whose mist obscures the very archipelago he has set out to write about. Although he cannot see land, Walcott is not without a reference point. The comparison to the Odyssey also implicitly compares St. Lucia’s ten-year war for independence with the ten-year war between the Greeks and the Trojans which precedes the events of the Odyssey.
By referencing Helen’s grey hair and the “white ashpit” of Troy, Walcott bypasses the conventional story of the Trojan war, which has focused on the victory of the Greeks, to commemorate instead the wreckage they left in their wake. Although Odysseus was Greek in Homer’s version of the story, here Walcott resituates him on the shores of Troy, “by the drizzling sea.” It is there that Walcott’s Homer uses the rain to write an epic poem. By relocating the Odyssey to a land torn apart by war, Walcott implies that St. Lucia, which just underwent a similar war, could also be a place from which poetry can spring.
In the second section, Walcott turns from Greek epic to the English legend of Tristan and Isolde. In that story, Tristan, an English noble, travels across the sea to Ireland, where he falls in love with Isolde (“Yseult” is a less common alternate spelling, but not unique to this poem). The British legend fares a bit differently than the Odyssey. While Walcott finds power in reclaiming a kind of alternate, Trojan version of the Odyssey for himself as colonized subject, he casts “A Map of the New World” in opposition to the legend of Yseult. The legend is the loud sound of the sea, while this poem is a secret ship smuggled onto shore. Walcott thus associates Britishness with the sea, while the colonized poem becomes a secret, silent ship wandering through that sea in search of a place to rest. The image suggests the difficulty of finding a place, as a St. Lucian writer, when surrounded on all sides by the long past of British legend.
After independence, what new kinds of writing might be possible? “Far from the curse of government by race,” the speaker is able to linger with seditious writing. This sedition is entangled with the island itself. Walcott plays on the word “leaves,” which can refer to the pages of a book as well as its more conventional meaning. When “the leaves flash silver signals to the waves,” Walcott renders an island landscape that has a voice of its own. That landscape is also the landscape of the book, which is similarly able to speak. With that voice, he is able to speak to the waves, and to linger with the scent of the sea without being stranded on it—to hear a story like the legend of Yseult without having his own story erased.
By the end of the poem, this capacity to speak to the sea has become a powerful tool for finding freedom. No longer lost at sea, the poet is instead able to address the “generous ocean” and ask it to “turn the wanderer / from his salt sheets” and bring him home instead. The “salt sheets” here symbolize the wandering writing at sea which begins the poem—“sheets” of paper suffused with the salt scent of the sea. Instead of this kind of writing, the speaker asks for a poetry that is no longer lost in the mists at sea, and can instead turn towards home. The final line, “wrench his heart’s wheel and set his forehead here” is exceptionally beautiful in describing this theme. The image of setting one’s forehead on the earth forms the perfect contrast to being lost at sea, because it suggests instead a position in which “here” has been found so exactly that the poet can touch it with his forehead. That finding, in turn, rewrites the discovery of the new world which the title references. In contrast to the colonizer, who “discovers” a new world and alienates its people from themselves, the speaker in this poem returns to a place they have already known and, rather than claiming to discover it, is able simply to be with it.
