AQA Power and Conflict: Understanding 'Storm on the Island'

Seamus Heaney

'Storm on the Island' is of key significance to Heaney, as it was one of the first poems that he ever had published, and led directly to his first book. It was published in December 1964 in The New Statesman, together with 'Digging' and 'Scaffolding'. As a direct result, Faber and Faber wrote to him to ask him to submit a manuscript, something he described as 'like getting a letter from God the Father'. His first collection, Death of a Naturalist, followed in May 1966. 

As its title suggests, the poem describes the experience of being in a storm on a small island. It is probably intended to represent one of the many islands off the west coast of Ireland, but it is made anonymous (despite the particularising 'the') for the purposes of the poem. Seamus Heaney is not often shy about being precise when it comes to location, names and times, and so the lack of precision here suggests deliberate choice, designed perhaps to make the poem more universal in terms of its description. In this way it is typical of early Heaney, who tended to write about the personal and emotional impact of nature, rather than directly deal with political or social issues. 

Nonetheless, it has been suggested by some commentators that the language that Heaney uses and the experience that he chooses to describe here suggests that the storm, while being a literal event, may also represent the political conflict that overshadowed his young adult life (the first letters of the title spell out 'Stormont' and of course 'Island' and 'Ireland' are near-homophones). I would be careful with this interpretation, as of course although there was separation and division between Protestants and Catholics when Heaney was a young man, 'The Troubles' in Northern Ireland--the deeper civil unrest and fighting--did not start until the late 1960s. Writing at this time, Heaney's poems may reflect unease at social division, but he is unlikely to be speaking of armed conflict, and the images of war in this poem cannot spring out of his experience of 'The Troubles' since they did not start for some years after he wrote it.

The Aran Islands

An alternative background for this poem is one of the most famous of Irish poems by WB Yeats: 'Prayer for my daughter'. In this poem, the poem recalls looking after his baby daughter while there is a storm outside his house. The experience leads him to meditate upon her possible future, and to remember his relationship with Maud Gonne, recalling her political involvement  and praying that his daughter does not get drawn into the same way of thinking. So perhaps Heaney mentions non-existent haystacks in the same breath as roofs not only because of real experience of stormy weather, but because he is half-remembering the opening lines where the storm is described as 'howling' as it attacks the house and the wind is characterised as 'haystack and roof-levelling'. Other echoes are 'the sea-wind scream...and scream in the elms' which seems to echo the 'chorus' of the windblown trees, and 'the murderous innocence of the sea' echoed in the way in which the sea turns from sleepy innocent cat to vicious attacker.  

Skellig Michael

The storm is on 'the' island--implicitly the only island that the speaker thinks worthy of reference — this in itself suggests a small, rural community. The lack of definite article before 'storm' suggests that this is one of many storms, as the first lines make clear. It describes a particular storm, but the response to it can demonstrate a typical way of life and a characteristic way of behaving. The landscape described in the poem strongly resembles the Islands to the west of Ireland, such as the Aran islands or Blasket islands. These islands are typically without trees, and limited in terms of agriculture, beautiful in the summer and in calm weather, but so bleak in harsh and stormy weather that they have become less inhabited as time goes on. One of the islands off the Irish coast (not likely to be the one Heaney was thinking of) is Skellig Michael, made famous through the last 'Star Wars' film, which though steep and apparently inaccessible sheltered a monastic community in years gone by. The tenacity of the people who would build on such places is very much present in Heaney's poem. 

The nineteen-line poem is written in blank verse—that is, unrhymed iambic pentameter—and has a conversational tone, opening with a direct address to the reader as though responding to an unspoken question. In this way, it takes on some of the qualities of a dramatic monologue, as though we were eavesdropping on a conversation that we had caught half-way through. This sense of a silent, unseen auditor is reinforced by the use of the second person throughout the poem, accentuating the sense that the reader or someone else is directly addressed: ‘as you can see…you know what I mean…you listen to the thing you fear…you might think’.  However, there is little irony in the poem, and its main purpose does not appear to be to reveal more about the character of the speaker, so in this sense it is not typical of a dramatic monologue.  

The poem opens with a direct address to the reader, as though in answer to an unspoken question ’How do you cope with these storms on the island?’ immediately asserting ‘we are prepared’. The strong caesura emphasises the depth of this preparation--it expends not just to temporary protection, but to the whole way in which the people live their lives: 'we build our houses squat'. The repeated use of the collective 'we', the first person plural pronoun invites the reader to imagine a community, and the direct, simple, monosyllabic language seems to suggest a people who are down-to-earth metaphorically as well as literally (with their ‘squat’ houses). The use of the second person draws in the the reader to this experience: as the poem progresses, it sounds as though the speaker is showing around his auditor (the use of 'as you can see' reinforces this) and expressions such as ‘you know what I mean’ seem to become used less as discourse markers and more to suggest  a depth of shared experience.  This means that by the time the speaker says ‘you listen to the thing you fear’ it seems to suggest that this is a shared or universal understanding. In this way, by the last line the ‘we’ of the poem seems to include the reader who has implicitly partaken in the experiences described.

The poem uses enjambement throughout to create a sense of the conversational, as the meaning of lines flows over the line-ending. This is matched with occasional abrupt caesuras , such as 'full /Blast'  or 'But no:' which break up the narrative and remind us of the difficulties that the islanders face. There is also a great deal of alliteration and assonance in the poem, particularly sibilance, with the ‘s’ sounds suggesting the noise of wind and waves. This starts initially paired with the monosyllabic, solid lexis of 'squat', 'sink', 'slate', with the harsher 't' dentals and the alliteration of 'rock and roof' alternating with and grounding the sibilance, as though to imitate the regular movement of the waves. This then moves into a looser, freer sibilance as the storm description builds which culminates in the lines 'dives / And strafes invisibly. Space is a salvo'  where the alliteration seems as relentless as the bombardment of the waves it describes.

Personification is a key technique in 'Storm on the Island', with nature seen as continuously active and purposeful. Trees are seen as potential ‘company’, leaves and branches capable of singing a ‘tragic chorus’. The gale itself is seen as something violent, the use of the powerful verb ‘pummels’ suggesting an active personality that beats the land with malign intent. The earth of the island is described as ‘wizened’ and old, and carrying on the image, is infertile, fertility seen with ironic humour as an untidy problem; the earth, says the speaker, has ‘never troubled us / With hay’ which is seen now as a blessing as 'there are no stacks / Or stooks that can be lost'. 

Strong antithesis is also used throughout the poem. If you look through it, you can see how often Heaney juxtaposes a word like 'build' (connotations of height) with one such as 'squat' which suggests an opposite meaning. A phrase such as 'sink walls' for instance is the opposite to what you might expect (raise walls) and yet it passes almost unnoticed, such is the craft of the poem. This technique adds to the sense of the unexpected, the unusual, that threads through the poem, with the juxataposition of ‘exploding’ with ‘comfortably’, for instance, emphasizing the  normality of extremely violent waves from the islanders' point of view, and so emphasizing the fearful and extreme nature of this particular storm. 
In the second half of the poem, the personification continues in a different way with anthropomorphism, as the sea is personified as a giant cat—reminiscent of James Reeves’s poem ‘The Sea is a Hungry Dog’. It is possible that this poem was an influence on Heaney, and I'm tempted to think that it was something in the back of his mind  simply because it's hard to imagine someone writing in the 1960s who would have been unaware of it. It was extremely popular, and was used in the 50s and 60s as an example of metaphor and personification--indeed it is still there on TES, with example lesson plans and worksheets! Interestingly, the image of the 'tame cat /Turned savage' is the structural opposite of the pattern of the Reeves poem, where the sea is imagined firstly as ferocious and hungry and then quiet and peaceful at the end of the poem.


The final image of the poem is a warlike one—the wind is seen as something like a fighter or bomber that ‘dives and strafes’ to ‘bombard’ the islanders with a ‘salvo’ of wind, while the sea ‘explodes’ on the rocks. Like civilians being bombarded, the islanders can do nothing to combat the wind, but simply 'sit tight'. This semantic field of warfare accentuates the sense of the islanders as besieged by the weather—something that the description of the ‘squat’ houses with ‘rock’ and ‘good slate’ emphasises.

The poem  uses litotes, throughout, so that through emphasizing negatives, a positive picture is built up (in the same way that if you were to say you didn't like sailing, it would make the person you were talking to think of sailing). Thus, each time the speaker describes what is not on the island, an image is created of those things (like trees and haystacks) that should be there. Although it is initially suggested that the negative aspects of life on the Island can be seen as positives, with ‘no stacks / Or stooks that can be lost’, the negative semantic field carries on (never…no…lost…nor) until it is clear that life on the Island does have significant disadvantages. 

This repetition of negative features is one of the techniques that holds the poem together, moving from 'never troubled us' to  ‘no stacks /Or stooks…Nor are there trees’ echoed further on with ‘no trees, no natural shelter’. Each possible positive that the auditor is imagined to think of—'you might think that the sea is company'—is met with a negative: 'but no', until you reach the final negative of 'a huge nothing', which seems to sum up the lack of all the other comforts mentioned and denied in the poem--trees, hay, stooks of corn, natural shelter, a 'comfortable' and comforting sea. Paradoxically (again!) because the islanders finally fear 'a huge nothing' (the paradox of vastness and emptiness imaging the invisible wind) it can be said that they do not fear at all--they literally fear nothing. The poem ends with this ironic twist. It is as though the speaker is saying 'we don't have anything to be afraid of', though he means of course the opposite.