hello everybody and welcome to this video where i'm going to analyze the sheamus heaney poem storm on the island as always please give this video a thumbs up and subscribe to the channel so let's begin with the poet seamus heaney and when you're analyzing a poem you don't just want to write down any old detail about the poet you just want to look at what are the details from the poet's life that help us to understand the poem itself in this case storm on the island so he was born in 1939 and died in 2013. those dates will be significant and i'll explain them later he was a northern irish poet playwright and translator and his early poetry storm on the island is an early poem focused often on rural life and matters of identity and ancestry so storm of the island was published in hini's first poetry collection death of a naturalist and the publishing history of this is quite interesting and it'll help us to understand the form of the poem so basically heeni had three poems which were published in 1964 in the new statesman and one of those was storm on the island along with digging and scaffolding the following month the faber and faber editor charles monteith approached heaney and asked him to send him some poems to look for publication and that eventually led tahini's first book death of a naturalist and this is really important because getting signed up to faber and faber was a big deal for hini it led to him getting some really prestigious jobs and everything else that happened to him so the publication of the three poems one of which was storm on the island is really significant now i'm talking about that because the context of the publishing and the context of how these poems were written is important in helping us understand the poem storm of the island is one of three poems within death of a naturalist which was written about the aran islands a group of three islands on the west coast of ireland got a lot of irelands in there in death of a naturalist storm on the island follows singh of iran a poem similar in many ways which describes the power of nature on the aran islands and this contextual detail is important later again when we explore the form of the poem so i'm going to explore two different interpretations of this poem storm on the island there are actually lots of different interpretations you can look at it as a love poem about two people in love and the metaphor of their relationship but as you're probably studying this poem from the power and conflict cluster i'm going to look at two ways of interpreting the poem which are relevant to that so it's possible to look at the idea of this being a poem about power because it's a poem about the power of nature with the literal interpretation of the poem being about a storm which hits a house on the aran islands and this picture on the left here is actually one of the aran islands gives you an idea of the sort of setting secondly though on the right we can focus more on the conflict aspect of the poem which can be read as a metaphor for the conflict in northern ireland but before we get there let's look at a literal interpretation of the poem the content is quite complex so i'll offer a translation into simple english to get us started we are prepared we build our houses squat sink walls in rock and roof them with good slate so the speaker is telling us that we and we never really know who the wii is we are ready we build our houses short and wide to withstand the powerful wind we lay firm foundations and we build strong roofs the wizard earth has never troubled us with hay so as you can see there are no stacks or stucks that can be lost nor are there trees which might prove company when it blows full blast you know what i mean leaves and branches can raise a chorus in a gale so that you can listen to the thing you fear forgetting that it pummels your house too so the narrator is saying where we live the earth is so dried up and shriveled we've never been able to farm to grow and to grow crops so there's no threat of losing the hay that we've grown because we don't have the conditions for farming and as you can see there's no hay or corn here that could be lost in the storm there aren't trees either which if we did have trees they could keep us company during the storm because of the sounds that are made as the wind blasts through their branches and leaves which can be a very loud noise and that kind of noise allows you to listen to what you're afraid of and forget that it's attacking your house at the same time but there are no trees no natural shelter you might think that the sea is company exploding comfortably down on the cliffs but no when it begins the flung spray hits the very windows spits like a tame cat turns savage so there are no trees there's no shelter and you might imagine that the sea down by the cliffs there will keep us company as it splashes away on the cliffs but no it doesn't keep us company because when the the storm begins the waves smash against our windows the sprays from the waves hits our windows suddenly changing from something comforting into something vicious we just sit tight while wind dives and strafes invisibly space is a salvo we are bombarded by the empty air strange it is a huge nothing that we fear this last bit as as with a lot of the poems in the anthology a little bit ambiguous now but we just wait patiently indoors while the storm whirls around us outside the the wind is invisible as if what we fear is non-existent so to summarize then the narrator of the poem describes how well prepared he and others are for a coming storm they've built their houses to withstand the battering that they're going to take but as the poem progresses this confidence begins to dwindle the narrator becomes more and more desperate now as always we aim to analyze language structure and form when we're looking at a poem and structure and form are the more sophisticated lines of analysis so i'm not going to go through every bit of language in this poem uh the similarly spits like a tame cat some of the more obvious things that you might have picked up on in your own reading i'm going to try and look at the more complex things if we see this poem then as a presentation of the uncontrollable power of nature it compares nicely to extract from the prelude by william wordsworth and much of the poem structure really reflects the uncomfortable and uncontrollable aspect of nature so as i said there are two interpretations the power of nature or the northern ireland conflict i'm just talking about the first one to begin with so if you look at the poem on the screen now the poem consists of one long stanza one long verse which is is actually made up of many long and complex sentences if you read the poem aloud you realize there's not much room to stop for breath as the poem progresses so both the lack of stanza breaks and the lack of breathing space reflects the overwhelming situation the speaker finds themselves in it is a non-stop barrage there's no start time to stop and pause and think and breathe and that is very much what it's like being in the danger of this storm similarly the poem contains enjoyment where the sentence is run over into separate lines here's an example where a single sentence spans six lines nor are there trees which might prove company when it blows full blast you know what i mean leaves and branches can raise a chorus in a gale so that you can listen to the thing you fear forgetting that it pummels your house too so he needs use of our genre like the use of one long stanza like the use of very long sentences creates a constant barrage of information which reflects the constant barrage of the storm on the house so it's not enough to just spot the device you've got to actually link it to the meaning and if we're looking at the power of nature the overwhelming constant barrage is reflected through the structural choices some things seem a little bit confusing though in the midst of this power heaney uses everyday language such as you know what i mean and this contrast between the language of conflict and power and the language of everyday life seems oxymoronic it doesn't mean seem to make sense but perhaps is used to simply suggest that this is everyday life to the narrator as awful as it sounds to us and this is further demonstrated when he uses the oxymoron exploding comfortably and these two words don't seem to make sense together but they reflect how the speaker has made sense of the conflict-filled world in which he lives even if it might not make sense to us or how he's used to this very um conflicted contrasting way of life this sense of the storm being nothing new for the narrator is reflected in the poem's rhyme scheme the poem contains very little in the way of rhyme its lack of control is reflected once again in the lack of rhyme it's an uncontrollable storm and in many ways the poem itself is it lacks control however there is some half rhyme in the opening and closing couplets so if we look at the first couplet here we are prepared we build our houses squat sink walls in rock and roof them with good slate that's an example of half rhyme i talked before about half rhyme but it's where the stressed syllables of the end consonants rhyme but the vowel sounds before them do not now this is a bit confusing so let me show you what i mean with squat and slate the final consonant sound is that sound in squat and slate it's the same sound so there's some rhyme taking place but the vowel sound before is different in squat it's the wa sound and in slate it's the a sound so that's a half rhyme because the consonant sounds right but not the vowel sounds that go before them and we see the same in the final two lines of the poem we're bombarded by the empty air strange it is a huge nothing that we fear look at air and fear both have the same consonant sound at the end the r sound the r but the vowel sounds are different in air we've got the e vowel sound and in fear we've got the e vowel sound so there are two things to explore here we get no marks for just saying that half rhyme is used we've got to think about how can we link the use of half rhyme to the overwhelming power of the storm and what the poem is is explaining well the use of half rhyme ties in with the other usages in the poem the wild storm refuses to be controlled or organized so only a half rhyme is possible amidst the chaos healy probably knew that to use full rhyme here would have been too perfect too obvious too explicit and too very much different to the rest of the poem it would be too perfect for a representation of the chaos of a storm but the bigger question is why have any rhyme at all and i think the answer lies in where the rhyme occurs at the start and the end so in terms of the rhyme pattern the poem ends as it begins with a half rhyming couplet and this gives the poem that cyclical structure creating a sense that the storm is inescapable and will continue to occur time and time again that this is just a way of life for the narrator and the other people whoever they are in the poem pretty clever that i love hini's use of rhyme i analyzed his poem follower on this channel too very similar things taking place in that poem now the form i'm going to suggest tentatively that this is a dramatic monologue many people assume that storm on the island is just describing a moment in heaney's life and this is why i said it's important to know that this is a poem about the aran islands and a number of irish writers historically have written about the aran islands seeing them as a link to the historical past of ireland the aran islands contain some of the oldest archaeological remains in ireland so the poem can be seen as typical of early genie in that it explores both rural life and identity not through an experience he had but through a historical view of ancestry and past heaney has commented before how in his autobiographical poems they're written in the first person pronoun i but how poems presented with the pronoun we present a wider cultural experience so storm on the island can be read as an example of a dramatic monologue then a dramatic monologue is a poem where we have a single person talking to someone else but the speaker is not the poet and the listener is silent throughout so essentially it means that we're listening to a one-way conversation and it's a form which allows us to identify the speaker's character from what they say so the poem does fit those conventions of a dramatic monologue heaney is taking on the persona of an islander describing the horrors of the storm you could say there are some things missing it's not as long as your typical uh dramatic monologue and we don't have this gradual reveal of a sinister underlying plot as we do in a lot of dramatic monologues like my last duchess porfirious lover but the other elements are certainly there so we could say that it at least adheres to some of the conventions of the dramatic monologue and the question again would be well why well the form presents a one-sided view of everything there's no equality in a dramatic monologue we literally hear nothing from one side of the conversation so perhaps we could say the dramatic monologue form reflects the imbalance in the relationship between the speaker and nature there is only one dominant voice in that relationship and the lack of voice suggests that nature is indifferent to what's going on it really doesn't care that it batters the narrator's home and fills him with fear so those are some of the ways we can look at this as a power poem about the power of nature but we can also see the poem as being a poem about uh conflict or the conflict uh in ireland and northern ireland so i'm just going to spend two minutes giving you the context of the troubles in ireland i asked my good friend pete who is irish to send me an email explaining this and the poor guy i didn't realize it was going to end up being a 20 000 word essay but it's a complex story but i'll give you a a two minute overview so in the late 12th century britain invaded and took over ireland beginning small-scale immigration with lords coming over and settling the land now obviously the people in ireland were not happy with that and this began a series of small uprising and conflicts all over the country where the irish were essentially kicking off against their oppressors but in the 16th century things went up a notch huge tracts of land were confiscated and settled by planters who made plantations and this had the effect of uprooting the traditional culture and injecting british and protestant communities and identities now the planters were from all over britain and the ones who settled in northern ireland were largely protestants from scotland so the irish rose up and threw the brits out in the 16th century and the irish were able to clear three provinces but the ulster scots held on in 1922 southern ireland became a separate country outside of the uk and northern ireland stayed part of the uk and heaney was born shortly after this in 1939 which is why it's so important to know when he was born what he was living through when he was writing this poem now speaking in very general terms there were the protestants who considered themselves british and wanted northern ireland to remain in the united kingdom and opposed to this were the catholics who wanted to leave the uk and have a united ireland and catholics in northern ireland heaney was one of those might face persecution from the police and government in northern ireland so in the 60s when heaney was writing this poem northern ireland was filled with sectarian problems there was a civil rights movement for the irish catholics and the goals were to end discrimination against the catholics though one example is that not everybody had one vote at the time in northern ireland business owners got two votes and most business owners were protestant so there was a real sense of injustice and unfairness now the unionists who were loyal to the queen kicked off against that civil rights movement and that led to the formation of the paramilitary ira and this was a group set up to protect the besieged catholics of the north but they also had an agenda to drive the british out of ireland through a bombing and terror campaign in 1998 we had the good friday agreement which was supposedly the ending of the troubles but of course as everybody is aware it's still going on today there's still sectarian tensions and maybe not all out conflict but definitely still problems so to sum it up because i know it's confusing you've got to look at the mentalities involved the irish mentality is that the british came in stole our land we fought for over 800 years to get them out and managed it with the formation of the free state in 1922 with the exception of northern ireland but of course all the british people who came over in the informal plantations came to see themselves as irish their families were born and raised in ireland and there's this tension that's still there so that's the context you need to know so why does the poem have anything to do with that i hear you ask well look at the title storm on the island the first eight letters of the title spell stormont which is the name given to the parliament buildings in ireland so there is a definite link between the poem and politics now you might not be convinced by that so let's look for some more political conflict content in the poem in terms of the structure analysis all of the structure points that i've already made about this being about the power of nature the relentless inescapable nature of the attack of the storm can also be applied to the idea of conflict in this interpretation too so i don't need to repeat those ideas but the enjambment and the one long stanza and the lack of punctuation and the cyclical rhyme scheme all of those things can be applied to the nature of the the troubles in northern ireland the conflict in ireland but there are some differences when it comes to language as well when talking about language heaney once said in 1972 in the guardian that the poet's skill quote lies in the summoning and meshing of the subconscious and semantic energies of words that's a great quotation which points to the fact that multiple meanings can be taken out of words and phrases in poetry so let's have a look at some of the language choices that seem to suggest this is a poem about the conflict in northern ireland why does the poet use the pronoun we well one interpretation is that it reflects a sense of solidarity between in this case the catholics any sense of we or us suggests with it a sense of them so the language choice here suggests opposition but the most obvious language points to make would be to look at the language of warfare which is used within this poem we've got blast pummels exploding bombarded those are four examples there are two others which are a little bit more complex but uh strafes and salvo also that's the language of warfare strafe means to repeatedly attack with gunfire or bombs whereas salvo is the simultaneous attack of bombs or gunfire so we're left with this question if this poem is just about a storm why use numerous references to war and perhaps it's because the storm itself can be read as a metaphor for the violent political troubles the ireland has experienced it's something you can look at afresh now look at the poem afresh and re-read the whole thing in that light and see if you can pick out any other details put them in the comments section if you do the final thing that i want to talk about i don't want to go beyond 20 minutes really is this the use of blank verse in this poem so blank verse is where you have lines of iambic pentameter with no rhyme okay there's a tiny little bit of rhyme but mostly there's no rhyme and the lines are in iambic pentameter do you remember iambic pentameter it's lines of ten syllables with alternating stressed and unstressed syllables so we are prepared we build our house is squat you can see here on the screen ten syllables every other syllable which is in bold which you might not be able to see brilliantly so i apologize for that but every other syllable is stressed we pronounce we put the stress of our pronunciation on it so this is really interesting to me because why use such a controlled structure in a poem which is really about the very opposite of control in a poem which is either about the power and and uncontrollable nature of a storm or the power and uncontrollable nature of the sort of conflict in in ireland well heeney once spoke about how he wanted to find a way of making the central tradition of english poetry which we'd absorbed in college and university absorb our own particular eccentric experience now as a student of literature yourself you'll no doubt agree that iambic pentameter is certainly a central tradition of english poetry so you could say that hini is using iambic pentameter um very cleverly because he wants to use the as he puts it here the tradition of english poetry but he wants to infuse it with his own irish ancestry and experience here and what i like as well is that you could talk about how there's a real mixture here of the very english iambic pentameter and also the everyday irish talk as i talked about so far the sort of conversational you know what i mean so we've got two things juxtaposed two opposites put together the very english iambic pentameter and the everyday irish talk and that could of course reflect the conflict between the irish and the english he said in the past that he writes in iambic pentameter for less intense stuff so the use in this poem certainly does seem to be deliberate and complex and if we're thinking about this in terms of conflict between ireland and northern ireland catholic and protestant then what better way than to use some very irish at the very irish setting and the the very irish conversational phrases but also the very english uh you know iambic pentameter to represent that conflict now you might think that's too far-fetched and you know you can go for a similar interpretation that the contrast between the wild storm and the control of the poet uh reflects the contrast between the opposing sides and the troubles or the contrast between the weather and the narrator in the the power storm based interpretation and again if you've got a better idea put it in the comments section below please do subscribe to the channel guys and thanks for watching