How do I analyse Storm on the Island for GCSE?

What is Storm on the Island about?

The speaker belongs to a small community on a bare, exposed island, and talks to us as if showing a visitor round. The poem opens with a confident claim, "We are prepared", then explains why. The houses are built low and solid, with walls sunk into the rock and good slate roofs. The land is too poor to grow hay, so there are no haystacks for a gale to scatter.

There are no trees either, which the speaker half regrets. In a gale, trees at least keep you company with their noise, and without them there is no natural shelter. Nor is the sea any comfort. Once the storm begins, spray is flung at the windows and the wind seems to attack from the sky, while the islanders can only sit tight and wait.

The last line admits what the opening tried to hide. The thing they fear is "a huge nothing": the wind, which they can neither see nor fight.

What is the context of Storm on the Island?

Seamus Heaney (1939 to 2013) grew up on a farm in Northern Ireland, in a Catholic family. He became one of the best-known poets writing in English and won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1995. Storm on the Island comes from his first collection, Death of a Naturalist, published in 1966. Many poems in that book are rooted in country life and the hard physical work of the land.

Many readers also hear a pun, a play on words, in the title. Said aloud, "Storm on" sounds like Stormont, the building where Northern Ireland's parliament met. Read that way, the island becomes Ireland, and the storm the tension between Catholic and Protestant communities in the North. That tension broke out into the Troubles, a violent conflict that began in the late 1960s, a few years after the poem was published.

Heaney never names any politics in the poem, so treat this as one possible reading rather than the meaning. A good approach is to write about the literal storm first, then show how war words such as "strafes" and "salvo" open the door to reading it as a poem about conflict.

How does Heaney present the power of nature in Storm on the Island?

Heaney starts with human confidence. "We are prepared" is a short, firm statement, and "We" makes it the voice of a whole community that has faced storms before. Even the land is described in human terms. "This wizened earth" is personification, giving human qualities to something that is not human: "wizened" means shrivelled and wrinkled with age, like an old face. The land is too worn out to grow much, so the islanders have little to lose.

The sea breaks that confidence. When the storm starts, spray at the windows "spits like a tame cat / Turned savage". This is a simile, a comparison using "like" or "as". A pet cat belongs inside the home, so the image suggests something familiar that has suddenly turned on the people who trusted it. The islanders thought they understood nature. They were mistaken.

Then the storm becomes a battle. The wind "strafes invisibly", and to strafe is to attack with gunfire from low-flying aircraft. "Space is a salvo" is a metaphor, describing one thing as if it were another, and a salvo is many guns firing at once. Its hissing s sounds, called sibilance, copy the sound of the wind. The islanders are "bombarded by the empty air", so the enemy is everywhere and nowhere at once.

The final line opens with a single word, "Strange", as the speaker admits that what they fear is "a huge nothing". This is a paradox, an idea that seems to contradict itself, because nothing cannot be huge. It suggests the real power lies in fear, and in how helpless people feel against something they cannot see.

What do the form and structure of Storm on the Island add?

The poem is one stanza of 19 lines. A stanza is a group of lines, like a paragraph in a poem. With no breaks, the poem looks like one solid block, much like the sturdy houses it describes, and it gives the reader no pause from the storm.

It is written mostly in blank verse: unrhymed lines of about ten syllables with a loose da-DUM rhythm, called iambic pentameter. Heaney roughens that rhythm so it sounds like someone talking. The speaker even addresses us directly, as if chatting to a visitor, so the calm voice feels more fragile as the storm builds.

Enjambment, where a sentence runs on past the end of a line, adds tension. In "spits like a tame cat / Turned savage", the line break makes us wait, then the change arrives suddenly at the start of the next line, just like the change in the weather. Caesura, a pause in the middle of a line, works the other way. The full stop after "strafes invisibly" splits its line in two, and the short sentence that follows, "Space is a salvo", lands like a burst of gunfire.

A volta is a turning point in a poem. Here the confident mood starts to crack when the speaker admits the sea is no company either, and it turns completely in the last line. The word "Strange" sounds like the speaker stopping to take in a truth the confident opening left out.

Which poems does Storm on the Island compare well with?

Storm on the Island pairs best with poems where nature holds the power, or where people wait anxiously for a threat they cannot control. Exposure, The Prelude extract and Ozymandias are all strong choices.

What could an exam question on Storm on the Island ask?

Storm on the Island could appear on AQA Paper 2, Section B. The paper prints one named poem from the Power and Conflict cluster, and you compare it with one other poem from the cluster, which you choose and write about from memory. The question is worth 30 marks, assessed on AO1 (your response, backed by quotations), AO2 (how language, form and structure create meaning) and AO3 (context). There are no marks for spelling, punctuation and grammar in this section.

Two focuses to practise: how poets present the power of nature, and how they present a sense of safety being shaken. For either one, Storm on the Island could be the printed poem or the one you bring from memory.

Here is an original model opening for the first focus, comparing Storm on the Island with Exposure:

Both poets present weather as an enemy that cannot be fought back. Heaney's islanders are "bombarded by the empty air", a phrase that turns the wind into an air raid with no attacker to aim at. Owen's soldiers face "the merciless iced east winds" in a war where "nothing happens". Yet the two endings differ. Owen's men are worn down by waiting, while Heaney's speaker finally admits the fear itself, calling the storm "a huge nothing".

Notice how it moves between the two poems sentence by sentence, instead of writing about one poem and then the other.

Key quotations from Storm on the Island to learn

These six are short enough to learn, and together they trace the poem from confidence to fear.

• "We are prepared": a confident opening, spoken for the whole community, which the rest of the poem tests.
• "This wizened earth": personification makes the land old and shrivelled, too poor to grow crops.
• "spits like a tame cat / Turned savage": a simile in which something familiar turns dangerous.
• "strafes invisibly": a verb from air warfare, for an attacker nobody can see.
• "Space is a salvo": a metaphor of guns firing together, with hissing s sounds that echo the wind.
• "a huge nothing that we fear": a paradox showing that the real enemy is fear itself.