Home and Belonging
The central conflict within the poem involves the speaker's conflicted sense of belonging to her environment. Immediately, she is characterized as having estrangement from her surroundings: “It took a hurricane, to bring her closer / To the landscape.” The storm is familiar, even familial (“ancestral”), and “reassuring.” She asks of the gods, “What is the meaning / Of old tongues / Reaping havoc / In new places?” She believes the storm comes from an “old tongue” to a “new place.” The contrast between “old” and “new” reveals the speaker has left her homeland. She asks, “O why is my heart unchained?” This lamentation expresses an internal desire to be rooted in a place. In the final line, the speaker feels consolation in the storm’s reminder that “the earth is the earth is the earth.” Anywhere on Earth, the final line suggests, can serve as home due to a certain innate universality.
Force and Power of Nature
This poem was inspired by a particular powerful storm that hit the English coast in 1987. The force of the storm—which Nichols calls a “hurricane”—is great. The speaker is kept awake listening to the wind “howling” and “gathering rage.” The “tongues” that sent the storm are characterized as “reaping havoc,” meaning causing chaos and destruction across the landscape. This includes uprooting trees which fall “heavy as whales” into their “cratered graves,” killing them. The fifth stanza focuses on the terrible power of the storm to raze a landscape. It is such a terrible act that the speaker asks the gods for the “meaning” of the destruction.
Transformation and Mystery
The speaker experiences an epiphany during the hurricane, which quells her uncertainty about belonging in her new environment. This transformation comes in the midst of a terrible storm. The “mystery” of the storm is referred to multiple times, suggesting it contains unknowable truths. The speaker is left to interpret the significance and meaning of the storm, with the help of the gods she calls upon. Clarity seems to emerge within the fourth stanza, in which the speaker describes a “blinding illumination” in the midst of “further darkness.” This “illumination” could be literal, referring to lightning in the sky, but it is likely a metaphorical representation of a sense of enlightenment. Indeed, after the “illumination,” the speaker focuses on gaining clarity about her internal struggle. First, she directly addresses her internal struggle—“O why is my heart unchained?”—and then aligns herself with the goddess Oya, who in the Yoruba religion controls the weather. By learning from Oya, and following the “sweet mystery” of the storm, the speaker allows herself to heal inside (“break the frozen lake within me”) and resolve the anxiety over belonging.
