Blog Post # 4 on Rhetorical or poetic technique

In the poem “The Sea is History” by Derek Walcott, we can identify poetic technique that Culler describes in chapter 5 and the first four lines in this poem illustrate that fact. in the first line he asks, “where are your monuments, your battles, martyrs?” He wants to attire our attentions by expressing an emotion that push us to think and develop our knowledge about the past events. In the second line he also asks, “where is your tribal memory?”, he uses convention of unity to give correlation between these two lines and he ends the second line by using the world “sirs” that is an important feeling of responsibility. In the third line, he says all these things are “in that grey vault”. He employs the words “grey” to express the color that is more perceptible by the readers and use “that” to show the closeness of the vault. Also, he repeats two times the words “sea” to be understood by the readers and we can interpret the “sea” as equal to the time, the past and the history where everything is consumed and would finally disappear. In the fourth line he writes that “has locked them up” by making allusion to the sea. At the end, he writes that “The sea is History”, he uses metaphor to compare the sea to the history that can be considered as a place where everything is stocked and finally would disappear. In this part of the poem, the author doesn’t use contrast but use a logical continuity to express his ideas. This procedure creates meaning of the poem and let readers follows the flow of the rhyme.