Considering that Derek Walcott’s “A Careful Passion” navigates the dissolution of a relationship, the poem centers on the theme of heartbreak. Specifically, he uses dense images of the sea to illuminate the transient nature of love. Synchronously, the poem’s irregular, mixed verse throughout the poem—knitting together randomly placed couplets and ABCB rhyme schemes within stanzas—highlights Walcott’s depiction of how painful yet significant moments in life reflect nature’s immaterial qualities.

For example, the poem investigates the speaker’s fleeting memories. Walcott emphasizes memory as a theme with recurring images of the sea, especially images of the waves and seagulls. In doing so, he portrays memories as having a transient but fixed energy. The following passage illustrates how the poem interweaves water imagery to reinforce this portrayal:

Above our heads, the rusty cries
Of gulls revolving in the wind.
Wave after wave of memory silts the mind.

Walcott’s meditative lines use this ocean landscape to mirror the fleetingness of memories, like migrations of seagulls flying in the sky. Similarly, he repeats the phrase “on the water’s edge” throughout the poem to reflect the idea of memories being on the cusp of floating away into the endless abyss of the sea. The undulating waves dually represent the sea’s harsh yet beautiful force of energy, and Walcott includes melancholy, decaying images of nature—juxtaposed with gorgeously vivid descriptions of the shore—to underscore the theme of heartbreak:

The hand which wears her husband’s ring, lies
On the table idly, a brown leaf on the sand
The other brushes off two coupling flies.

In this quote, Walcott uses brown leaves, and two coupling flies brushed off into the wind, as metaphors for dying love. Throughout the poem, heartbreak embodies a sort of death, while also giving the speaker the opportunity to subtly question the prospect of resurrection. In expressing that “hearts learn to die well that have died before,” Walcott also describes the heart as self-seeking, “so desperate for some mirror to believe,” and contemplates whether “to resurrect the buried heart again.” These varied representations explore the pain of experiencing a relationship dissolving and poignantly underscore how memory and heartbreak mirror the natural landscape the speaker immerses himself in.