The Flock

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1985

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Summary

Background

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Symbols & Motifs

Winter

From time immemorial winter has carried a negative association. It is a time when the Earth is frozen, when plant life seems to die, and when people are in danger of succumbing to illness or death from starvation or harsh conditions. It is a time of loneliness and isolation—a time to endure. In “The Flock,” Walcott calls winter “the white funeral of the year” (Line 12) and notes that in the Arctic, where it is always winter, the mastodons and “giant minds” (Line 33) get frozen in place. Throughout the poem, winter is a threat to humanity, impeding the ability to move and live.

However, the reference to a “wintry flare” (Line 46) suggests that winter can bring light and its own kind of warmth. It is the kind of light that kindles the poet’s imagination and causes him to write.

The Flock

Birds are a recurring motif throughout the poem. The migrating ducks the speaker sees—the “blue-wing teal and mallard” (Line 2)—later become figurative birds that symbolize the poet’s words and creative impulses. These bird-words are “settling the branched mind” (Line 21) in the speaker’s imaginary landscape. Later they rise up in a “high, whirring flock” (Line 44) and the speaker calls them “a blessing” (Line 43) though they are not moving only to please him, but also for their own “need” (Line 48).

The birds symbolize the imagination, and their movements are responses to the forces that act upon the imagination and the fragmented influences of culture. In ancient times birds were often associated with omens; here too, the speaker uses his bird-words to predict the future through “augury” (Line 20). In the end, the flock of ideas returns to the speaker, defeating the lonely, isolating, frozen feeling of winter.

The Knight

Knights are a medieval European image that connotes nobility, determination, and warrior code. Walcott’s speaker equates his task to a quest undertaken by a knight with the iron will to move against the winds that “urge the mallards south” (Line 15), forging his way deeper into the cold. Similarly, speaker is fighting his natural inclination for warm weather, staying far from home to continue his creative process in a forbidding, frozen place that is inimical to human life. The fight against isolation makes the speaker into a knight—a knight of the intellect and of personal discovery.

The Ant

Much of the poem meditates on the impersonal and vast powers at work in the world, like the inflexible spinning of the globe and the indifferent and deathly churning of the Arctic. In contrast, the speaker offers an image of an incredibly vulnerable and seemingly helpless creature. After portraying a knight attempting to scale a mountain, the speaker reduces even this relatively powerless figure: The knight is “ant like” (Line 13) crossing the “forehead of an alp” (Line 13). This is an image of an impossible task—a tiny insect trying to get across the world’s most forbidding peaks.