Poetry, Year 11: Storm on the Island, Bayonet Charge and Remains (Power and Conflict option)

1966

HintIn the mid-1960s, in the poet's first major collection.

The whyThe collection is Death of a Naturalist. Seamus Heaney was born on a family farm in Northern Ireland, and much of that book is about rural life.

As one unbroken block of nineteen lines, with no stanza breaks

HintThere are no gaps.

The whyOne reading is that the solid block looks like the low, sturdy houses the islanders build. Another is that it gives the reader no shelter or pause, like the storm.

We

HintNot one person.

The whyThe speaker talks for a whole community that faces the weather together. The tone is conversational, as if explaining island life to a visitor.

From confidence that they are prepared to fear

HintCompare the first statement with the last.

The whyIt opens with a firm claim about how well the houses are built. By the end the islanders can only sit it out while the wind attacks.

The vocabulary of war: the language of an air attack

HintThink of aircraft and artillery.

The whyThe wind is described as if it were diving planes and gunfire. Nature becomes an enemy force, though one that cannot be seen.

It is nothing they can see or touch: only moving air

HintYou cannot fight it or even point to it.

The whyThe poem ends on this puzzle. Some readers link the unseen threat to the tensions in Northern Ireland; the first eight letters of the title spell Stormont, the seat of its government.

The First World War

HintA war of trenches, rifles and going over the top.

The whyThe poem does not name the war. Ted Hughes was born in 1930 and never fought in it; his father did, and came back deeply marked by it.

1957

HintTwelve years after the end of the Second World War.

The whyThe collection is The Hawk in the Rain. It also contains poems about animals, and Hughes's eye for a frightened creature shows in this poem too.

In the middle of the action: the soldier is already running

HintThere is no introduction or background.

The whyThe reader is dropped into the charge with no idea how it started, which is how the soldier seems to experience it. The term for this kind of opening is in medias res.

The third person: the soldier is he throughout, and has no name

HintThe narrator watches him.

The whyWe are close to his body and his panic but he stays anonymous. He could be any soldier.

A hare

HintA wild creature of open fields, bigger than a rabbit.

The whyIt has been hit and is thrashing about in agony. The innocent animal caught in the gunfire is an image of the soldier himself.

They fall away as useless; only terror and the urge to survive are left

HintIdeas such as crown and country.

The whyThe poem names the grand ideas and discards them in a single line. In the middle of the charge they are no use to him at all.

The accounts of real former soldiers

HintNot on the poet's own life.

The whySimon Armitage trained as a probation officer, not a soldier. The poems give a voice to men living with what they had seen; the speaker of Remains is usually taken to have served in Iraq.

They shoot dead a man who is running from a bank he has been looting

HintThe patrol was ordered to stop a robbery.

The whyAll three open fire together. The body is then handled roughly and taken away, and the speaker tells it in a flat, everyday voice.

Whether or not he was armed

HintIt decides if the shooting was justified.

The whyThe doubt is stated early and returns later in the same words, like a thought he cannot get rid of. He will never know the answer.

The dead man's body, and the memory that stays with the speaker

HintOne is a noun and one is a verb.

The whyThe second half of the poem leaves the war zone. The man is still there when the soldier is back in his own country, in his sleep and whenever he shuts his eyes.

His alone: by the last lines he is saying I and my

HintListen to the pronouns.

The whyAt first the blame is spread across three men. By the end he pictures the man's blood on his own hands: an old image for guilt that cannot be washed off.

Alcohol and drugs; neither works

HintTwo ways of numbing the mind.

The whyThe poem is often read as a picture of what is now called post-traumatic stress disorder: the event replays whether he is awake or asleep.