Storm on the Island — AQA GCSE English Literature 8702
AQA GCSE English Literature · 8702
Storm on the Island
The poems
What you need to know
Storm on the Island by Seamus Heaney: what it is about, its context, and how Heaney uses language, form and structure.
Key quotations and how to analyse them, and the poems in the cluster it compares well with, with similarities and differences.
How to use the lesson's key quotations in an essay, with a short worked paragraph.
Key quotations: 'We are prepared: we build our houses squat', 'This wizened earth has never troubled us', 'a tragic chorus in a gale', 'Exploding comfortably down on the cliffs', 'spits like a tame cat / Turned savage', 'Space is a salvo', 'We are bombarded by the empty air', 'Strange, it is a huge nothing that we fear'.
Language: the oxymoron 'Exploding comfortably', the pause after 'Strange', and the poem read as an allegory.
Context: the title's pun on Stormont, Northern Ireland's parliament, and Heaney's 1966 collection.
Comparisons with Exposure and the extract from The Prelude.
