Power And Conflict Poetry - Storm On The Island

Question 1

Who wrote Storm on the Island?

Answer 1

Seamus Heaney

Question 2

What is the big idea?

Answer 2

Power is only there if you let things scare you
Things lose power if you don’t fear them
Power of nature

Question 3

What is the structure?

Answer 3

19 lines of blank verse - conversational tone
Unrhymed iambic pentameter
Reveals the contrast between the sides in the conflict

Question 4

Storm on the Island

Answer 4

Extended metaphor of NI troubles

Question 5

The wizened Earth

Answer 5

Describe the land like an old friend

Question 6

Enjambment

Answer 6

Relentless

Question 7

Can raise a tragic chorus in a gale

Answer 7

Personification of weather as singing and powerful

Question 8

It pummels your house too

Answer 8

Violent language
Power of weather is dominant over man

Question 9

Exploding comfortably

Answer 9

Oxymoron
Violence of an explosion contrasts comfort

Question 10

The very windows, spit like a tame cat
Turned savage

Answer 10

Simile takes power away

Question 11

Space is a salvo.

Answer 11

Sibilance
Military language and metaphor
Weather and human aircraft are only what we make them

Question 12

Strange, it is a huge nothing that we fear

Answer 12

Oxymoron
Fear is a paradox
There is nothing to fear but thinking makes it so