“The Sea is History”
The sea has seen more than any human eye could have witnessed. It has lived long and continues to see the world as the years roll by. In the poem “The Sea Is History’’ by Derek Walcott, it reveals how the ocean had experienced the past. Was it really history? The poem explains that the ocean had seen the entirety of the New Testament. It expresses that before the death of Christ, “that was not history, that was only faith, and then each rock broke into its own nation.”(65-67). If we think of the ocean like a book, the pages about faith were the beginning, but there are no witnesses who live today that can justify it, despite the sea. There was so much yet to happen later in the book that can be justified by people today. Rather than acknowledging the documentation from this time, instead Walcott suggests that perhaps that is not considered history . It tests our understanding of what the past truly means. The poem consists of powerful examples of imagery, letting us imagine what the sea had gone through to get where we, as humans, are today. Those images let the reader understand that the ocean had seen those allusions of violence, emancipation, faith, and Lamentations, but it is almost like none of those had ever happened because of the furnace humans have ignited in our climate. Climate change could take all these stories away. History has been distorted.