Seven Seas

Character Analysis

A Mystery Wrapped in a Conundrum

Walcott knows that if you're going to go epic, you simply to have a "blind seer" among your cast of characters (think: Tiresias). He borrows the concept from Homer himself and tweaks it to fit the St. Lucian context. Seven Seas is old and blind, but he has an inner vision that gives him authority, as well as a deep well of experiences to share with his younger compadres.

That well of experience makes us and the other characters wonder just who Seven Seas really is. Ma Kilman thinks of him as an inscrutable curiosity, a man who would spend the day sitting in her shop and "muttering the dark language of the blind" (III.ii.17). Both his disability and language mark him out as something strange and somewhat fantastic:

Sometimes he would sing and the scraps blew on the wind
when her beads rubbed their rosary. Old St. Omere.
He claimed he'd sailed round the world. "Monsieur Seven Seas"

they christened him, from a cod-liver-oil label
with its wriggling swordfish. But his words were not clear.
They were Greek to her. Or old African babble. (III.ii.17-18)

So is he something mystical/mythical? Or is he just an old man with an unfortunate name? Wait—it only gets better as the story goes on.

What are You Doing Here?

We might just think of Seven Seas as an eccentric member of the village if we were to leave him at Ma Kilman's shop and never see him again. But that doesn't happen—nope, dude starts showing up everywhere, appearing to different characters around the world and across time. It's a pretty cool superpower.

He appears in Achille's spirit-journey to Africa, just after his people are taken by the raiders. Seven Seas seems to be the last person, aside from Achille, left in the village to grieve the loss of its people and their sad fates. He sits in an abandoned house and is "foaming with grief" (XXVII.ii.145) when Achille finds him. It's a brief appearance and one that feels like a dream ripe for interpretation.

In the very next section, the griot (poet/storyteller) appears and is intimately linked with Seven Seas—it's fairly clear where Walcott is going with his appearance. Seven Seas is the blind poet/seer (like Tiresias), an archetype that gets recycled in many cultures over time.

In case you want to test out that hypothesis, check out the other strange places that Seven Seas pops up. The narrator sees him in the Deep South as he explores the Trail of Tears: "I saw/the bundles of women moving in ragged bands/like those on the wharf, headed for Oklahoma;/then I saw Seven Seas, a rattle in his hands" (XXXV.i.177). Seven Seas, then, goes from St. Lucia to Africa to the Deep South, just like that.

He also tells Achille something very strange—that he was once a Ghost Dancer, joining Native American Indians in that ill-fated movement of 1890: "He described the snow/to Achille. He named the impossible mountains/that he had seen when he lived among the Indians" (XXXI.iii.164). So Seven Seas is a poet and a seer, but he's also something of an immortal or a time-traveler—he has to be in order to make it to these historical moments across the globe.

The takeaway? Seven Seas is much more than a mere man or character—he's an enduring cultural icon that just happens to be walking around St. Lucia in this poem. Walcott wants to make sure we understand his role as a mystical poet by telling us straight-up at the end of the work: "[Seven Seas] hummed in the silence. The song of the chanterelle,/the river griot, the Sioux shaman" (LXIII.ii.318). Yeah, that about sums it up. But wait… There's even more.

You Say Omeros, I Say Seven Seas...

One of Seven Seas's coolest superpowers is his ability to morph. We've seen this in his ability to become a griot and a shaman, but these are nothing compared to the role he plays at the very end of the poem, when the narrator takes a boat ride to the afterlife. Just as Dante gets his beloved Virgil to act as a guide to the Underworld, the narrator gets his master, Omeros. But Omeros doesn't look totally Greek on the boat ride out:

They kept shifting shapes, or the shapes metamorphosed
in the worried water; no sooner was the head
of the blind plaster-bust clear than its brow was crossed
by a mantling cloud and its visage reappeared
with ebony hardness, skull and beard like cotton (LVI.i.280-281)

The blindness of plaster-bust-Homer suggests to the narrator's mind the figure of Seven Seas, who now accompanies them on the final journey and switches identities with the ancient poet. It's no surprise that the narrator brings the two figures—his ancient Greek genius mentor and the folk icon of his own people—together at this moment. After all, he needs them both to get through his cathartic journey and come out in one piece.