The Sea Eats the Land at Home Summary & Analysis
by Kofi Awoonor

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Kofi Awoonor’s poem “The Sea Eats the Land at Home” was published in 1964 in his first collection, Rediscovery and Other Poems. An elegiac poem, written in free verse full of vivid imagery, it captures the destruction of a coastal African town by natural disaster. The sea in the poem is personified throughout, taking on greater metaphorical meaning in order to convey not just the all-consuming power of nature, but also the horrific devastation of colonization and the tragic loss of home and identity as a result of emigration.

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