Midsummer XXVII

The speaker of “Midsummer XXVII” explores the way America encroaches on the island of St. Thomas. The speaker, who presumably represents a version of the author, Walcott himself, feels uneasy about these changing allegiances. As the island transforms from a place of natural beauty to a place of greater industrialization, class division, and conflict, the speaker becomes increasingly aware of the way his own loyalties are being shifted, seemingly against his will.

In the first lines, the speaker declares, “Certain things here are quietly American” (Line 1). The term “quietly” (Line 1) American suggests that the influence of America is subtle. Some may not notice it, but the speaker does. The first aspect he focuses on is the chain-link fence that divides the ocean from the baseball field. The fence signifies division between classes and cultures, introducing the speaker’s own feeling of being divided by two different countries. The speaker subtly notes that to become American means to cross a divide, to choose loyalty to one side of the metaphorical fence, and not to straddle lines.

The natural parts of the island, like the pelican and the ocean, are being transformed by human perception into products of industry, like an “engine” (Line 6) or “sheets of zinc” (Line 20). This unusual way of describing the world on the speaker’s part points to the unnatural way that natural beauty can be turned into human-made products. The in-between, transforming language—”an early pelican / coasts, with its engine off” (Lines 5-6)—indicates the speaker’s own status as a person who himself is being transformed as the poem unfolds.

In the middle of the poem, the speaker describes the physical changes America has caused to the landscape. He draws attention to the way the Americans have industrialized the natural environment, making use of natural resources. The Americans are also importing American items into the island. There are “Cessnas” (Line 8) on “the airstrip under the freckling hills / of St. Thomas” (Lines 9-10), as well as sheds and hangers that remind him of “the last war” (Line 11). It is likely that this alludes to World War II, a time that spanned a large portion of Walcott’s childhood years and adolescence. The US built airstrips on Walcott’s home island of St. Lucia in 1940, when he would’ve been just 10 years old.

Fenced off villas keep the “illegal immigrants” (Line 14) separate from the wealthy elites, though the irony is that the immigrants are in fact the Indigenous people who come from the “unlucky islands” (Line 14); the owners of the villas presumably do not come from these lands themselves. Bulldozers carve up the island landscape, but this “must be suffered” (Line 19) in the name of American industry. The speaker shows the way that Americans take advantage of the Indigenous population, denigrating them, preventing them from taking jobs, and also despoiling their natural resources and what was once the undisturbed beauty of the hills.

By the end of the poem, the speaker states, “This / drizzle that falls now is American rain” (Line 22). Whereas at the start of the poem there were only certain things that were “quietly American” (Line 1), the end of the poem suggests that America’s takeover is near completion, or that the speaker’s awareness of it has grown. Rain falls all over the land, saturating it, the way America’s ideas, power, and physical emblems have saturated the island and the culture, carving its starry symbol into the sand.

In the last lines, the speaker shifts his focus from the island to himself. He says, “My own corpuscles / are changing as fast” (Lines 23-24). This inner change parallels the way the island changes, but on a more personal, cellular level.

The speaker notes that he fears “what the migrant envies” (Line 24). A migrant moving from the island to the United States (or from another part of the world to the island, which became a US territory in 1917) would want to see the American flag and become part of the United States. Migrants move to new countries willingly; the speaker’s dilemma is a reversal of the migrants’ story in that the United States has purchased and encroached on the island, without the consent of the people of St. Thomas.

The way that the speaker words the last lines, writing that the sands themselves are shifting loyalty, suggests that the takeover has come without the conscious participation of the native-born speaker. In the last line, he notes that “fealty” is “changing under [his] foot” (Line 26). Presumably, this fealty is the loyalty he feels he owes to his country. It can also represent the “fealty” of the land or of the culture as a whole. This change leaves the speaker uneasy and divided, much the way the island has become divided between Americans and the Indigenous population, and the way the natural world has been divided from the man-made one by a fence that reminds the speaker of “empire” (Line 4).