Sabbaths, WI

“Sabbaths, W.I.” is a free verse poem with lines that vary in length but often reach far towards the right-hand margin. Lines 11 and 27 leave the least amount of white space on the right-hand side of all the lines. Line 27, “those Sundays when the light at the road’s end were an occasion,” has 15 syllables. A few lines are short, such as “those nettles that waited” (Line 25), which only has six syllables. The lines have a variety of meters. Overall, Walcott’s generally long lines resemble American poet Walt Whitman’s long lines. However, Walcott writes his long lines about the West Indies, not about the United States, like Whitman.

Eight of the stanzas in “Sabbaths, W.I.” contain only one line. The longest stanza is the third stanza, which has five lines, followed by Stanza 12, which has four lines. Two stanzas—the second stanza and the second to last stanza—have three lines. This leaves four stanzas that have two lines. The wide range of line lengths can be compared to the fluctuating number of lines in the stanzas. Walcott also doesn’t include any end punctuation (like periods, question marks, and exclamation points). Only proper nouns, like Sunday, and the first word of the poem, “Those” (Line 1), are capitalized.