Storm on the Island
What it's about
Storm on the Island by Seamus Heaney describes a small community on a bare island preparing for, and enduring, a violent storm. The speaker begins confident that they are ready, but ends admitting that what they fear is ‘a huge nothing’.
Heaney grew up on a farm in Northern Ireland and wrote often about the landscape and rural life. The poem was published in 1966, in his first collection.
Form and structure
The poem is a single block of 19 lines in , with no stanza breaks, like a solid, squat house standing against the weather.
It opens with confidence: ‘We are prepared: we build our houses squat’. The tone is chatty, as if the speaker is talking to a visitor, pointing things out as though showing them round.
As the storm builds, the pushes the lines on. The turn comes at the end, where calm certainty gives way to fear.
Key terms
The storm as war
Heaney builds an : the storm is an attack. The wind ‘strafes invisibly’, like a fighter plane firing at the ground, and ‘We are bombarded by the empty air’. Words like these give the poem a of war.
The sea is friendly until it turns: it ‘spits like a tame cat / Turned savage’. The ‘Exploding comfortably’ captures the strange safety of watching danger from inside.
The final line, ‘Strange, it is a huge nothing that we fear’, shows the true enemy is invisible: the power of nature, or fear itself.
Key terms
The Troubles, themes and comparisons
Some readers see a hidden meaning. The title sounds like Stormont, the parliament of Northern Ireland, and the poem was published just before , the violent conflict there that began in the late 1960s. The storm may stand for political violence building up.
the power of nature; fear; conflict, perhaps political.
- Exposure: nature as the enemy.
- The Prelude: a person's confidence shaken by nature's power.
- Ozymandias: human power is small against nature and time.