Nature in the Prelude and Storm on the Island

How is nature presented in the Prelude and Storm on the Island?

Without doubt, nature is a powerful force in both the Prelude and Storm on the Island, however both poets use nature as an allegory for other powerful forces in their lives. These poems share a sense of the landscape as an active participant in the lives of people and they use dramatic imagery to portray that idea. In many ways these poems share a generic heritage: Wordsworth is the quintessential Romantic poet and with this poem, Heaney is a twentieth century inheritor of Wordsworth's baton (even down to the blank verse that both poets use).

Heaney’s poem is written in the first-person plural, giving a sense of the community on his island as speaking with one voice; everyone on the island is affected by the storms. Even though in the title there is one ‘storm’, in the poem, the speakers are clearly used to regular storms: they ‘are prepared’, building houses ‘squat’ to withstand the ‘gale’. In contrast, Wordsworth's poem is told by a very singular first-person voice, whose inner thoughts are very present. We know that Wordsworth wrote the Prelude as an auto-biography so this shouldn't be surprising, but the narrative structure of this extract makes for a good deal of first person action, unexpected in a reflective poem that deals with confused emotions. For example, ‘I unloosed ... I fixed my view ... I dipped’ etc. all emphasise a sense of story-telling in the bulk of the poem. Whereas Heaney is exploring a regular experience felt by many people, Wordsworth is very much focussing on his individual experience within nature.

The imagery in Wordsworth's poem is very vivid and, to begin with, very beautiful.  The wake of his boat is rendered as ‘circles glittering idly in the moon’ as the ‘stars’ twinkle above him. He wants us to understand that this is a sublime experience and this beauty needs to contrast with his terrified experience later in the poem. There are hints of darker forces at work, even before the ‘huge peak’ rears above him. When he takes the boat, he ‘unloosed her chain’ in an ‘act of troubled pleasure’. By gendering the boat as female and enjoying stealing her Wordsworth is suggesting his developing adolescent sexual desires (whether consciously or not). This hints at the ‘darkness’ that follows in the poem. On the other hand, imagery in Heaney’s poem is dominated by lack – lack of ‘stacks and stooks’, lack of ‘trees’ so there is no ‘tragic chorus’ and lack of comfort from the sound of the waves. The environment on this island is full of contradictions, the ‘chorus’ (that they don't have) is ‘tragic’ which, whilst oxymoronic, also suggests a funeral choir. Although there is nothing as calm and quiet as a funeral on Heaney’s island. In addition, the sea ‘explodes comfortably’ on the cliffs, another oxymoron, but perhaps suggesting that these island dwellers have become accustomed to explosions? Building further on this idea, Heaney characterises the sound of the wind as like a fighter plane, ‘bombarding ... [and] ... strafing’ the residents as they ‘sit tight’ unable to resist the onslaught. Nature here is constructed as a deadly force that, except for the people being hunkered down behind ‘rock ... [and] ... good slate’, would claim lives. For Wordsworth, nature is not overtly deadly, but it does seem to be the catalyst for great psychological upheaval in the speaker's mind. His terror at the ‘living ... peak’ is palpable from how he ‘trembled’ and ran from it. The consequences of this encounter are long and serious; the speaker was affected ‘for many days’ by the ‘blank desertion’ that drained all colour from his life. Today we might call this depression and we understand that feelings like this are common at periods of change in life – like adolescence. And we do get a strong sense from this extract of the Prelude of a young man beginning to make his way on the world: he rows with ‘skill’ but still has much to learn about the unknown that lurks over the horizon.

Whilst we might see the Prelude as something of an allegory for adolescence, Storm on the Island’s deeper meaning is harder to pin down. Heaney grew up in Northern Ireland during a period of violent conflict between Catholics and Protestants, so we could see this poem as representative of the political storms that Irish people were subject to at the time. This is certainly suggested by the violent semantic field we can detect in the poem. ‘Blast’ is used about the wind, but it is also a synonym for ‘explosion’. And we have already discussed the references to fighter planes in the final lines of the poem. The ‘we’ of the voice of the poem could represent the ordinary people of Northern Ireland who keep to their own homes in an effort to avoid the Troubles. However, it is the ‘huge nothing’ of the final line that most closely suggests a political reading for this poem. The wind is a ‘huge nothing’ in that it is just moving air, but it is extremely powerful. By the same token, the words of politicians are also just ‘air’, often referred to as ‘hot air’ but, in a situation like Northern Ireland, words can also have a huge, destructive force.

Heaney, like Wordsworth before him, was a poet who grew up living and breathing country life. Both of these men loved nature and wrote about it and used it as a central theme of their work throughout their lives. In these two poems, nature has great power – for Wordsworth that power is to transform the individual, and for Heaney the power is to subdue. However, for both of these men, in a greater sense, nature represents social forces or possibly even a pseudo-religious force, which controls and shapes the lives of the people who live within it.