December 2025

Lyric poetry is often understood as a mode of interiority associated with intimacy and personal address. Within literary histories shaped by empire, lyric has frequently been a mode of private address imagined as separate from the pressures of power. Yet this assumption becomes unstable when lyric is taken up by writers working in the aftermath of colonial domination, for whom inherited poetic forms like lyric arrive entangled with histories of violence and cultural erasure. In such contexts, lyric becomes a record of how feeling takes form. 

This paper examines how lyric functions not as refuge from empire but as one of the sites through which imperial power continues to be remembered, even desired. Focusing on Anthony Capildeo’s Venus as a Bear and David Dabydeen’s Coolie Odyssey, I read lyric address as the affective structure that binds speakers to forms of authority that they neither accept nor escape. These postcolonial poets do not reject inherited Western forms outright; instead, they inhabit and stretch them, revealing how prayer and fantasy can operate as conduits of power. By placing Capildeo’s reworking of devotional lyric alongside Dabydeen’s postcolonial engagement with The Tempest, this paper situates lyric as a medium suited to tracing the persistence of imperial attachment, an attachment that survives empire. 

Mythic Inversion and Imperial Setting in “Venus as a Bear: The Cabin Boy’s Prayer” 

Bjork’s 1993 song “Venus as a Boy” imagines an adolescent boy as the manifestation of the goddess of love. Desire flows towards the boy, the eroticized object of his lover’s gaze. Anthony Capildeo’s 2018 poem “Venus as a Bear: The Cabin Boy’s Prayer” takes up the same mythic mantle of lineage, only to invert its erotic direction and power dynamics. Capildeo shifts Venus into the figure of a “bear,” a term that can suggest both a navigational constellation and a form of adult masculine sexuality. When Venus is a bear instead of a boy, desire flows from an adult figure onto the youth, the cabin boys of imperial Britain. These boys resemble Bjork’s Venus-boy far more than Capildeo’s bear,” which is predicated with “Venus.” In “Venus as a Bear: The Cabin Boy’s Prayer,” Capildeo transforms lyric address into a critical lens for examining how imperial structures eroticize and exploit youth labor within the British maritime world. By grounding the poem in the geography of Greenwich, saturating it with religious diction, and staging a prayer uttered under coercion, Capildeo constructs a postcolonial counter-history in which lyric becomes a medium capable of granting voice to those excluded from history. 

One cannot analyze this poem without giving thought to the geographical locations that ground it in Great Britain. Beneath the poem’s title is the italicized subtext “Old Royal Naval College, Greenwich.” Though now a maritime museum, the site formerly functioned as a royal palace and later a training establishment for the Royal Navy. The Royal Navy’s purpose, specifically in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, was to establish and defend the British Empire. By situating the poem at the Old Royal Naval College, Capildeo places the poem within the architecture of empire itself, thereby shaping how the poem’s utterances should be read. 

In terms of locations named throughout the poem, the speaker stays confined to the immediate area surrounding the College. The speaker places themselves “between the market and the Cutty Sark,” a nineteenth-century clipper ship built exclusively for the China tea trade.[1]The tea trade was one of the commercial circuits through which the British Empire extended its economic reach; therefore, the Cutty Sark operates metonymically here, as it anchors the poem in the economic flows that sustained empire. 

In the following clause, the speaker describes the Cutty Sark as existing “where the Guildhall meets the river fog.” The Guildhall signifies civic governance, as the building was used for tax collecting, perhaps tied to taxes on colonies in the British Empire. By allowing the Guildhall to “take on college shape,” Capildeo blurs the boundary between civic governance and naval training, implying that the systems that regulated trade on land and those that extended imperial power at sea are structurally continuous. The “river fog” becomes the medium through which these boundaries dissolve, suggesting that imperial power operates through murky indistinctions. 

Capildeo's Refusal of History

The poem begins by rejecting the logic of official history. Though the speaker claims indifference to the “why” or wherefore,” Capildeo begins the poem with “Because,” a grammatical inversion that foregrounds causality, all the while withholding its origin. The poem thus stages an utterance whose prompting question is missing. The speaker’s claim that they are “no historian” does not disqualify their insight; rather, the claim functions as a refusal to speak in the authoritative mode that imperial history requires. By spurning the role of historian, the speaker rejects the conditions that have allowed history to omit the lived experiences of the cabin boys, the adolescent laborers who served imperial officers. Standard monuments of imperial commemoration are rendered soporific, as the speaker remarks, “marble statues set me dreaming.” 

The speaker’s strand of indifference continues when they claim to not care about “Lord Nelson’s last words, ‘Kiss me, Hardy.’” Admiral Horatio Nelson, killed during the 1805 Battle of Trafalgar, is one of the most storied figures in British history. Here, Nelson functions less as a historical figure than as an emblem of the British Empire. His victory at Trafalgar was integral in securing British naval supremacy during the Napoleonic Wars and helped cement the Royal Navy as the engine of an expanding empire. Though Nelson himself began his naval career as a cabin boy, his elevation into heroic myth requires the erasure of the boys whose labor made such heroism possible. His supposed dying words to Captain Thomas Hardy serve as a sentimental relic, one that Capildeo’s speaker refuses. The speaker’s disinterest again signals a refusal to be seduced by the emotional architecture that distracts from the Nelson’s legacy of empire and conquest. By brushing aside Nelson’s “last words,” the speaker makes space for a more suppressed voice---that of the cabin boys, whose prayer appears in the latter half of the poem.

Devotion and the Language of Prayer in “Venus as a Bear: The Cabin Boy’s Prayer”

The poem’s central scene unfolds within the chapel of the Old Royal Naval College. The speaker describes it as “full of marble caramel, salted with statues.” The “marble” in the chapel echoes the poem’s earlier mention of “marble statues;” however, here Capildeo replaces the white neoclassical figures typical of imperial memorial spaces with statues marked by “caramel” color. Their rendering in “marble caramel” suggests both aestheticization and erasure, as the boys are essentially objects suspended in sweetness. The adjective “salted” contrasts the sweetness of the caramel, and it evokes both the taste of seawater and tears. Though Capildeo resurrects the cabin boys by giving them a place in naval imperial history in the College, the boys remain devoid of agency. Statues cannot speak, and the only narrative they convey is the one imposed upon them by the viewer.

The religious setting intensifies this dynamic. Religious diction, present throughout the poem, surfaces most clearly in the boys’ song, “’Oh yes, I love the Lord. The Lord he is well spoken.’” The line hinges on an ambiguity that Capildeo refuses to resolve----whether “Lord” refers to God or to the aforementioned Lord Nelson. This doubleness collapses divine authority and imperial command into a single object of devotion; perhaps obedience to empire is a form of faith. The phrase “well spoken” gestures simultaneously toward religious praise and toward the prestige of English itself, the colonial language through which devotion must be articulated. The boys’ prayer then becomes a linguistic inheritance shaped by empire, as they have voices only in the language provided by empire. 

Jahan Ramazani argues in Poetry and Its Others that lyric often absorbs and refashions external discourses, be they religious, historical, or legal, without ever fully becoming them.[2]Capildeo’s religious diction, even his titling the poem a “Prayer,” does not make the poem devotional, since the speaker’s utterance is not an expression of faith but an exposure of how faith has been linguistically colonized. The boys’ prayer occupies the lyric space Ramazani describes, and it adopts the tradition of worship only to reveal how devotion has been bent to articulate imperial power. In this light, “[the Lord] is well spoken” becomes a lyric working of prayer that reveals the violence embedded within its holy language. 

Venus’ hybrid nature also speaks to the boys’ conflicting desires. As both goddess and bear, Venus is both a protector and a threat. The cabin boys’ longing for Venus is a longing for recognition from what generates their fear. Their desire cannot be separated from the structure that harms them. Perhaps here Capildeo implies that abuse produces its own forms of misguided devotion. The progression from desiring a “manifestation” to seeking “salvation” traces an escalation from wanting presence to seeking rescue. This progression resembles the psychological pattern of escalating attachment, as the boys’ attachment becomes dependence, which in turn becomes a plea for protection. This is why the poem’s lyric address takes the form of a prayer, a poetic form meant to reach a being who offers care; however, in this poem, care and danger seem inextricably intertwined. “Venus as a bear,” the final phrase of the poem, can refer to the constellation Ursa Major, which could signal hope or otherworldly intervention for the boys. The “bear” can also be the queer slang term, meaning an older, hairy gay man. By ending on this unstable image, the poem folds its religious diction back into a critique of imperial intimacy. 

"Treble, Breaking, Broken"

Capildeo stages the boys’ prayer by first calling attention to the conditions under which it is produced. The speaker describes “statues of at-risk youth, the trafficked, the fanatics, then known as cabin boys.” The sequence “treble, breaking, broken” charts both vocal register and psychological damage. “Treble” suggests youth; “breaking” marks the transition from boyhood to adulthood; finally, “broken” registers harm. The boys’ voices exist in a liminal space between innocence and damage. The poem insists that the boys do speak, if only through the fractured lyric medium that can communicate what the traditional tale of history elides. The shift from “treble” to “broken” also hints at the way exploited youth may be pushed into intimacy---contemporary discourse may deem this survival sex work.

This sequence of adjectives functions as a compressed theory of lyric utterance, as the lyric voice is at once whole and shattered. Jonathan Culler argues that lyric “aspires to be a condition of iterability,” in which an utterance can be repeated across time while retaining its force.[3]Capildeo’s depiction of voices both breaking and broken complicates this argument, as the boys’ song is indeed iterable, but each repetition bears marks of harm. Lyric continuity here is achieved only through the accumulation of fractures. 

The boys, in their prayer, reveal that their belief that Venus has not forgotten them only emerges “when the mandatory rum’s meridional in my brain and limbs.” Historically distributed aboard naval vessels as part of daily rations, rum appears as an instrument of impairment rather than of sustenance. The rum becomes “meridional,” a word suggesting a southern drift in the body; this diction indicates that the boys’ capacity to “believe” depends on their intoxication, not their free will. This conditional prayer exposes that their belief arrives only when agency is impaired. 

Capildeo’s Counter-History 

In “Venus as a Bear: The Cabin Boy’s Prayer,” lyric becomes the medium through which history is disrupted and reassembled. The poem situates the speaker within a museum space; but as the speaker listens to the imagined voices of the cabin boys, lyric intervenes through song to unsettle the smoothness of the museum. Lyric’s capacity to voice what was never recorded ruins the historical silence surrounding the cabin boys. The poem does not reconstruct the past as it was; instead, it produces a counter-history assembled through listening and imagination.

Capildeo’s position as a postcolonial subject intensifies poem’s chimeric nature. Capildeo is both inside and outside the narrative, as he is both a visitor to the museum and a Trinidadian shaped by the empire the museum glorifies. His lyric vision therefore mirrors the boys’ own fractured identities. Ramazani describes modern and postcolonial lyric as perpetually double, since it is continuous with historically white forms, all the while insistently different from them.[4]Capildeo’s poem exemplifies this doubled state, since it participates in the long tradition of both lyric and prayer, yet it simultaneously resists that tradition and exposes the violence embedded within its diction. Capildeo’s choice to write the poem in prose also resists the formal expectations of traditional lyric by refusing meter and lineation, despite retaining lyric address. This poem becomes an instance of lyric breaking itself in order to resist itself. If traditional devotional lyric, in the vein of George Herbert’s “Prayer (I)” or one of John Donne’s Holy Sonnets, aspires to divine reassurance, Capildeo’s devotional mode reveals the impossibility of true comfort within imperial structures. 

This poem is not an isolated experiment but part of a broader pattern in Capildeo’s collection Venus as a Bear, in which Capildeo repeatedly uses the lyric form to press against the limits of history and identity. Across the collection, Capildeo returns to inherited cultural spaces, such as the artists’ collective of “Kiskadee” or Glasgow’s Hunterian Museum in the triptych of a poem “The Antonine Wall.” 

This practice is especially clear in “Saying Yes to Zeus,” another prose poem in the collection where Capildeo stages lyric address as a direct confrontation with inherited divine authority. While addressing a museum cast of Zeus, the speaker adopts the posture of prayer and apostrophizes Zeus with the modifiers, “Tall,” “All-seeing,” “Dear,” and “Lord.” Midway through the poem, the speaker asserts, “You love mortality,” a phrase with a double meaning that crystallizes Capildeo’s critique of devotional intimacy under conditions of unequal power. Zeus’ love of mortality can suggest affection for humans; the diction also exposes Zeus’ love of what makes humans mortal---their inevitable death. Zeus’ love is inseparable from his dominance. He does not preside over mortality; rather, he delights in it, just as imperial power depends upon the expendability of those subject to it. This formulation closely mirrors the cabin boys’ devotion to their Lord, or to Venus, whose protection cannot be disentangled from threat. In both poems, the figure addressed by the speaker is loved because power itself has been eroticized. 

The closing sentence of “Saying Yes to Zeus” further highlights Capildeo’s focus on devotional violence. The speaker concludes, “It strikes me you are sometimes kind,” a phrase that hinges on the verb “strikes,” which denotes both a sudden realization and a physical blow. Like the cabin boys’ belief that Venus has not forgotten them---a belief that itself only emerges under intoxication---this admission reveals the speaker’s consolation as conditional. In both poems, lyric address does not culminate in reassurance; instead, it records the persistence of attachment in the absence of security. Capildeo’s poetry surrounding devotion reveals prayer as intimacy produced by unequal power, thereby binding speakers to figures who “love mortality” precisely because they govern it. 

Capildeo’s exposure of devotion as an intimacy structured by power imbalance places her work within a longer postcolonial engagement with inherited Western forms, most famously Shakespeare’s The Tempest. Long read as an allegory of colonial domination, The Tempest stages power through language and interpersonal relationships. Prospero’s authority on the island depends as much on the native resident Caliban’s attachment to his command as on physical constraint. Postcolonial rewritings of the play, such as of Aimé Césaire’s Une Tempête, have returned to these figures because The Tempest dramatizes a problem central to Capildeo’s lyric practice: how domination persists through intimacy and the promise of care. As Melissa Sanchez argues, Shakespeare’s play organizes political authority through what she terms networks of “seduction and service,” in which subjection is sustained by affective bonds that appear voluntary even when structurally coerced.[5]Within this critical tradition, The Tempest becomes less a source text than malleable material reshaped to expose the mechanisms of colonial authority. This tradition has continued in contemporary postcolonial criticism, which has read Caliban as a figure of resistance marked by an ambivalent attachment to the structures that dominate him. 

Such inheritance is taken up explicitly in the Guyanese poet David Dabydeen’s Coolie Odyssey, in which Shakespearean figures are revoiced through lyric monologue. Dabydeen’s poems shift attention away from overt scenes of domination toward the afterlife of empire as it is registered in memory and desire. These poems are not concerned with resistance in any straightforward sense of the words; instead, they explore how attachment to imperial figures and fantasies persists even after violence has been named. Read alongside Capildeo’s Venus as a Bear, Dabydeen’s work raises a shared formal question about lyric itself --- how do inherited poetic modes become sites where empire is critiqued while affectively sustained? The poems “Caliban” and “Miranda,” taken together, perform this problem from opposing positions within the colonial relation, and they complicate the familiar postcolonial readings of The Tempest.

In “Caliban,” Dabydeen stages imperial domination as an affective condition sustained through lyric longing. Unlike Capildeo’s cabin boys, whose devotion is coerced and seemingly chemically induced, Caliban’s attachment emerges through memory and fantasy. The poem, narrated by Caliban, repeatedly turns on diction of survival rather than rupture, such as “I remember” (7), “still to sense your presence” (27), and “craving still the magic of your making” (28). These phrases describe persistence, not resistance. Even as “the pool of myth / evaporated” (16-17), the “memory… of a mere instant of delight” (18-19) remains. Where Capildeo’s lyric fragments expose devotion as a posture imposed under duress, Dabydeen’s lyric smooths itself into continuity and allows Caliban’s attachment to endure beyond the poem’s moment of domination, most likely his sexual intercourse with the “you” of the poem---Miranda, semi-canonically and as implied by the complementary poem “Miranda” in the collection.[6] The difference from Capildeo is crucial, as Caliban’s longing is not primarily directed at the addressee’s explicit authority, but toward the affective promise embedded within his oppressor’s gentler surface. The poem’s diction, exemplified by “fantasy” (10), “presence” (27), and “magic” (28), marks a shift from command to care, thereby revealing how imperial power is able to secure loyalty through the cultivation of desire. In this sense, Caliban’s misguided love is a consequence of imperial structure. Lyric is the medium through which empire’s afterlife is felt as intimacy rather than oppression. Like Capildeo’s Venus and Zeus, the figure addressed in “Caliban” is loved not despite its capacity for harm, but because the power appears as tender to the poem’s speaker. 

If “Caliban” reveals how imperial attachment persists through longing and the act of remembering, “Miranda” exposes the complementary perspective of how empire fashions itself as maternal, and erotically pure in order to invite such longing in the first place. “Miranda” is quite explicitly directed towards Caliban, since the poem opens with the phrase “His black bony peasant body” (1). The two poems are linked most explicitly through their shared solar imagery. Towards the end of “Caliban,” the addressee returns “unambiguously / To sunlight” (23-24), a phrase that figures imperial authority as illuminating and decisive. “Miranda” initially appears to counter this logic, as the speaker promises to “blot out the tyrant sun” (4), seeming to offer protection from the very force that governs Caliban’s longing. Yet the diction of this gesture signals possession rather than refuge. To “blot out” the sun is to temporarily eclipse rather than liberate, and the poem’s repeated language of cleansing recasts domination as nurture. The speaker promises to “cleanse you in the raincloud of my body” (5), and uses a simile “like a new mother licking clean its calf” (8). Maternal and erotic imagery merge, thereby transforming authority into intimacy. The poem ultimately collapses this fantasy of protection when it admits that, presumably after the figure has stopped obscuring the sun: 

“And the sun resumed its cruelty 

And the sun shook with imperial glee 

At the fantasy.” (David Dabydeen, “Caliban,” from Coolie Odyssey, 16-18)

The repetition of sun throughout the poem refigures it as an agent whose “cruelty” is not momentary but resumptive, suggesting that domination was suspended but never dismantled. The sun, a symbol of empire here, seems to delight at the very illusion of protection that briefly obscured its violence, given that it “[shakes] with imperial glee.” The phrase “at the fantasy” retroactively names the promise of protection as a fiction staged for Caliban’s benefit. In this moment, Dabydeen reveals that imperial benevolence is an affective strategy. Read against Capildeo’s fractured devotional lyric voice, Dabydeen’s “Miranda” exposes a more unsettling condition, one in which lyric attachment persists even after the fantasy of protection has been named as such. Empire does not require belief to endure; it requires the continued circulation of desire. 

Together, Capildeo and Dabydeen exemplify how lyric poetry offers a site for tracing the affective structures through which imperial power persists. In Capildeo’s Venus as a Bear, devotion exposes prayer as a posture shaped by unequal power rather than free belief. In Dabydeen’s revoicing of The Tempest, lyric memory and fantasy smooth this fracture into continuity, allowing attachment to endure even after domination has been named. What emerges from this comparison is a reorientation of lyric. Lyric reveals itself to be a form capable of registering the persistence of attachment where resistance alone cannot suffice. These poems suggest how power can remain an object of attachment even when it is recognized as harmful.  

WORKS CITED

Capildeo, Anthony Vahni. Venus as a Bear. Carcanet Press, 2018.

Culler, Jonathan. Theory of the Lyric. Harvard University Press, 2015.

Dabydeen, David. Coolie Odyssey. Hansib Publications, 1988.

Ramazani, Jahan. Poetry and Its Others: Prayer, Song, and the Dialogue of Genres. University of Chicago Press, 2013.

Sanchez, Melissa E. “Seduction and Service in ‘The Tempest.’” Studies in Philology 105, no. 1 (2008): 50–82. JSTOR.

FOONOTES

[1]Royal Museums Greenwich, “History of Cutty Sark,” https://www.rmg.co.uk/cutty-sark/history. 

[2]Jahan Ramazani, Poetry and Its Others: News, Prayer, Song, and the Dialogue of Genres, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), 130.

[3]Jonathan Culler, Theory of the Lyric (Harvard University Press, 2015), 8.

[4]Ramazani, Poetry and Its Others, 236. 

[5]Melissa E. Sanchez, “Seduction and Service in ‘The Tempest,’” Studies in Philology 105, no. 1 (2008): 50–82, JSTOR, 62.

[6]Or perhaps Prospero, in a homoerotic turn of events!