Hurricane Hits England — Edexcel GCSE English Literature 1ET0
Edexcel GCSE English Literature · 1ET0
Hurricane Hits England
The poems
What you need to know
Hurricane Hits England by Grace Nichols (1996): a Caribbean-born woman in England kept awake by a great storm that brings her closer to home, and how Nichols moves from third person to first and calls on the gods of storms.
Key quotations and how to analyse them, and the poems in the collection it compares well with, and on which themes.
How to use the lesson's key quotations in an essay, with a short worked paragraph.
Key quotations: 'It took a hurricane, to bring her closer', 'The howling ship of the wind', 'Like some dark ancestral spectre', 'Talk to me Huracan / Talk to me Oya', 'My sweeping, back-home cousin', 'Tell me why you visit / An English coast?', 'Falling heavy as whales', 'O why is my heart unchained?', 'Come to break the frozen lake in me', 'That the earth is the earth is the earth'.
Form and structure: free verse that starts by watching 'her' and moves into 'I' and 'me', repeated calls of 'Talk to me', a run of questions, and a final repeated line that answers them.
Language: the storm as a ship, a spectre and a relative from home, oxymoron ('Fearful and reassuring'), fallen trees as whales, and the storm breaking the 'frozen lake' inside the speaker.
Context: Nichols, born in Guyana in 1950 and living in England since 1977, whose poems draw on Caribbean rhythms and Guyanese and Amerindian folklore; the great storm of 15 to 16 October 1987 in southern England; Oya, the Yoruba orisha of winds and storms, Shango, god of thunder, and the Taino storm word that gave English 'hurricane'; and Hurricane Hattie of 1961.
Compares well with: Presents from my Aunts in Pakistan (two cultures), Home Thoughts from Abroad (home remembered far away), I started Early – Took my Dog (nature's force personified) and Adlestrop (a single event that stays in the memory).
