Storm on the Island: look at the representation of displacement. Maybe the poet believes it is easier to talk about the weather than political instability. Initial language offers the illusion of impregnability and defiant security. This shifts with the Volta announced by ‘But’. Do you think Heaney is exploring the storm as a means of talking about the volatile situation in Ireland? Hence the repetition of ‘we’ suggests a coherence and community that becomes steadily vulnerable and fragile, under siege.Nature is the enemy as in Exposure. And I wonder if this exploration of nature’s capacity for intimidation and disturbance is also a metaphor for human nature’s propensity for disharmony.In other words, if nature is the predatory enemy in Storm on the Island, maybe the ‘island’ is human identity itself. This might also explain why there remains something deeply illegible about the effect of the storm in the poem. ‘ a huge nothing that we fear.’ Are we authors of our own destruction time and time again?All the imagery around defiant inviolability, confidence and control at the beginning of the poem steadily disintegrates as the poem progresses.Finding words serves as an initial protection or shield and then they are undermined first by the Volta and then the caesura. What began as ostensibly solid and courageously barren is transformed into a series of abstractions that reflect the poet’s loss of faith in control ‘space is a salvo.’The world has become punitive and abstract.By contrastthere is little sense of control in Owen. The poem explores physical and mental bewilderment. A resignation to impending mortality explores through the poet soldier’s estrangement from his own being and identity. The poem is more direct in its admission of human superfluousness and futility. No hubris only disappointment and disorientation. ‘Nothing happens’ feels like Macbeth’s nihilism in Act 5 when he announces the void of ‘tomorrow.’Maybe contrast with the monumental arrogance of Ozymandias whose hubris survives in the inscription and the ‘sneer’ captured by the artist in the surviving fragments of the sculpture. The traveller and poet appear circumspect; even humbled by the magnitude of human folly mocked by nature as well as time’s relentless progress and indifference to human endeavour.Yet interestingly, in all three poems, the folly of human beings is preserved in art: so perhaps a form of reconciliation can occur and achieve near mmortality.
