Walcott's Modern View of the Odyssey

In "Map of the New World," Walcott describes a boat traveling through archipelagoes of the New World. He references the Odyssey, conveying a legacy of colonization and war.

Walcott makes a parallel between the sailboat in the Americas and Odysseus. After "the sail will lose sight of the islands," Walcott bridges the gap between the subjects he compares: "The ten-years war is finished." This ambiguous claim refers to the sail, but also to the next subject - he describes the damage of the Trojan War from which Odysseus flees. The notion of irreversible destruction applies to both that from which the sail returns and the Trojan War.

Walcott writes with more specificity about the Trojan War than the sail of the first half of the poem - much is left to inference. By equating the sail with Odysseus in his journey home, however, Walcott suggests the harm done to the New World is comparable to the destruction of Troy.

This analogy serves much more than to fill in the ambiguities of "Map of the New World." In the last stanza, Walcott describes a man who "plucks the first line of the Odyssey." After the damage described earlier in the poem, the (presumably Western) man continues to read this epic poem, considered one of the finest works of Western literature. The epic is so ingrained into Western culture, that its subject matter of colonization and war is as well. The literature the West values may not have a direct correlation with its imperialistic tendencies. Nevertheless, just as the Odyssey has been embraced by the West for centuries, so has its pattern of invasion and subjugation of other cultures.