Storm on the island — a few notes
Sarah (@ladybarkbark) asked me on Twitter if the poem Storm on the Island was about the Troubles. My thoughts were too long-winded for a tweet, so I wrote them here:
Like so much of Heaney’s work, Storm on the Island is about place. It is written in the language of the land, evoking a hardy people weathering inhospitable terrain.
We are prepared: we build our houses squat
Sink walls in rock and roof them with good slate.
They take their strength from the land, though the land provides ‘no natural shelter’, battered as it is by the wind and the wild sea, which ‘spits like a tame cat turned savage’.
But place for Heaney is unavoidably political. In his imagined island he alludes to the Irish famine, using the word ‘stooks’ (meaning corn sheaves) to evoke the period in which the export of grain continued while families starved.
The wizened earth had never troubled us
With hay, so as you can see, there are no stacks
Or stooks that can be lost.
But he also moves us on from that point. The martial language — ‘strafe’ and ‘salvo’ — reminds us of the Easter Rising and its brutal suppression by the British army. Storm was published in 1966, a year that saw the 50th anniversary of the Easter Rising, the formation of the UCDC to oppose the civil rights movement and the emergence of the UVF. Here, we are in a world of battening down the hatches — against police brutality, against sectarianism, against the rising tide of the Troubles. Heaney uses the history of the land to capture the storm that was brewing in Northern Ireland in this period.
Written before the 1968 riots that are generally held as the start of the Troubles, it is impossible not to read Storm on the Island through the prism of the present. (Although that, I would argue, is the way in which poetry remains relevant long after it has been written.) In fact, Heaney creates his own prism in the poem, unearthing images of the past in a fragmentary narrative of Irish history that underpins his political present. Through the trope of his island he takes us from famine, to rebellion, to civil unease. Whether or not it is explicitly about the Troubles, Storm on the Island is unquestionably political, turning the images of victimhood around to finish on a fierce rejection of the status quo.
Strange, it is a huge nothing that we fear.
