Blog post #4

    In chapter 5, the author talks about poetry and rhetorics. Poetry tends to be more persuasive while rhetorics tends to be a more imitated alternative. In “The sea is history” by Derek Walcott, the beginning of the poem caught my attention because the metaphor interested me. Walcott states  “Where are your monuments, your battles, martyrs? Where is your tribal memory? Sirs, in that grey vault. The sea. The sea has locked them up. The sea is History.” He states that the sea is history and that really caught my attention. This example illustrates the extravagance of lyric because he is comparing history to a sea. There’s a level of exaggeration in these sentences because there’s no comparison between the sea and history. But what I think the author is trying to say when he basically compares the sea and history to one another is that both share a major similarity; many things can easily vanish in both. The sea is deep filled with many lost non-retractable items, much like history where things can easily slip and vanish. History as we know may not be the full truth of the history many people experienced because history is told from the perspective of those who are able to tell it; those who hold the power to write it.