Analyzing George Awoonor's 'At The Fishhouses'

Jingjing Zhang
ENGL 2310
Dr. Hector Perez
May 2, 2016
“At the Fishhouses” by Elizabeth Bishop Analysis
The poem is more of a descriptive than an analytical poem. It begins with the description of how an old fisherman was mending his nets in one of the fishhouses until it was dark. She goes further to describe the coastal environment which she finds to be silver but also opaque at some points. She does not talk much about the old man until she introduces him later in the poem, “The Old man accepts a Lucky Strike. He was a friend of my grandfather”. At this point, she describes the discussion about them then goes ahead to describe the sea.
She reveals the difficulty in describing the sea. She only uses simple words, “cold, dark, deep and clear”.
They also help her give a broad description of the environment which creates a mental picture in the audience making the poem memorable and exciting to read. The poem is quite straight forward except for the last bits when she compares the sea to knowledge.
“The Sea eats the Land At home” by George Awoonor-Williams Analysis
Awoonor uses “The Sea eats the land at home” to reveal the pain that he and his neighbors had to undergo when they were displaced from their homes by the raging seas. Having been born on the coast, it was normal for the water to rise above the land spreading destruction wherever the waters went. He, therefore, use the poem to reveal how the sea is at times wild to people living around it.
At the beginning of the poem he describes how the seawater invaded their homes, “At home the sea is in town/ Running in and out of cooking places”. He then goes ahead to describe the destruction that the sea causes by “destroying the cement walls/ and carried away fowls/ the cooking-pots and the ladles”. The sea, therefore, destroys the people’s homes and property, for example, the animals represented by the carrying away of the fowls and household
Awoonor profoundly describes the damage that the storm water caused in the coastal community. The in-depth description enables one to get a mental picture of the destruction. Throughout the poem one can see the damage with very minimal effort. In the third stanza, for example, one can totally imagine the Aku, standing outside her house with her arms on her breast weeping loudly. Besides her are her two children who are cold and shivering and almost clinging to their mother for protection.
Awoonor also uses repetition in his poem. He always repeats the line, “the sea eats the land at home,” particularly since the final line of the stanzas. This line enables him to emphasize the fact that the sea water comes to the land at times and destroys the peace and the property of the coastal communities. It also reveals the unfairness of the sea; it has all the large space to itself but in its arrogance, it rises beyond the shore and attacks the people living around