nature

• Nature = violent (SOTI)


  'blasts' - verb -explosion, cannons

  'pummels' - verb - relentlessly hit

  'exploding' - verb - 'exploding comfortably' - oxymoron

  'bombarding' - verb - 'bombarding by the empty air', 'huge nothing that we fear' - shows that nature isn't physically hurting people, it is mentally effecting us, we are scared of something that doesn't have a physical form

  semantic field of violence - shows how nature is avenging what humans have taken from it - connotate to war, conflict, battlegrounds
• nature = uncontrollable (SOTI)


  'like a tamed cat turned savage' - simile, shows how it was calm and now it is chaotic - unpredictable

  'winds dive and strafes invisibly' - 'dive' and 'strafes' - verbs - jump and attack repeatedly - 'invisibly' - adverb - it people can't see their attacker

  'bombarded by the empty air'
• SOTI - structure

  • enjambment - chaos of nature
  • 1 long stanza - nature is always going to be there
  • long sentences - no breaths/ pauses - nature suffocates us
  • everyday language - 'you know what I mean' - makes the chaos seem normal
  • half rhyme - 'squat' and 'slate' (start - hard 't' - clocks?) and 'air' and 'fear' (end - hard 'r') - cyclical structure
  • dramatic monologue - everyone feels the same - protestants pushing their views on to the Catholics
  • blank verse
• SOTI - context


  Heaney;

  • NI poet
  • born in 1989
  • talks about nature - Aran islands - experience storms a lot

  troubles ;

  • NI vs RI - discrimination against Catholics
  • 1922 - Southern Ireland wanted independence from England
  • 1960
  • 'Stormont' - Irish parliamentary building
• nature = violent (exposure)

  • 'merciless iced east winds knife us' - personification, the winds are so cold and they constantly attack the soldiers
  • 'mad gusts tugging on the wire' - personification - the wind has gone crazy/mad
  • 'misery of dawn begins to grow' - new day makes them upset
  • 'bullets... less deadly then air' - the air kills more soldiers then the fighting

  nature killed more soldiers in WW1 then the Germans
• nature = overpowering (exposure)

  • 'all their eyes turned to ice' - the soldiers die and then become nature
  • 'dawn massing in the east her melancholy army' - personifies dawn - 'melancholy' - sad, miserable - clouds
• Exposure structure

  • quintet stanzas + ABBAC rhyme scheme + stanza structure (1st line = blunt and powerful, 2-4th = emotive, final = anti-climax) = show the structured lives the soldiers had to live
  • caesura
  • sibilance/fricative alliteration - ' sudden successive flights of bullets streaked the silence' and 'flowing flakes that flocked', 'flakes with fingering stealth come feeling or our faces'
  • pararhyme - 'knife us' + 'nervous', 'silent' +'salient'
  • last lines =questions - nature and conflict makes soldiers wonder their worth
• exposure - context

  • Wilfred Owen - soldier, died a week before Armistice, was a Christian but felt the church let down its people, revolutionised war poetry - before = romantic
  • WW1 - public hadn't experienced a war in over 100 years so it felt like a myth, trenches = dirty, infectious, horrors of war portrayed religious beliefs ('for love for God seems dying'), soldier - constantly waiting - adrenaline
• nature = manipulative (Prelude)

  • 'led by her'

  'her' = feminine

  nature is personified as guiding the young person to the boat, it seems like it plans the whole experience out if it is leading them to the boat, where they know the person will get scared by the sheer size of the mountain top
• nature = controlling (prelude)

  • 'horizons upmost boundary' - 'horizon' - sun - life, nature gives life, it will always dominate man, 'upmost boundary' - highest point, most power, nothing can break it
  • 'voluntary power instinct upreared its head' - 'voluntary power' - nature reveals to man it will always come back, greater and more intimidating - 'its' - personification is gone from before it has dehumanised it out of fear making it seam terrifying, 'upreared' - raised
  • 'trembling oars' - nature induces so much fear into the boy that he can't control himself, he shakes with so mush fear he can't row the boat - builds tension - will he be able to make it safely back to land
• prelude - structure


  blank verse - one long verse - nature is overwhelming

  no rhyme - nature doesn't abide by human rules

  enjambment - shows chaos nature creates within

  caesura - makes us stop

  present participles - ' stepping', 'leaving', 'glistening' sparkling' - beauty - 'howling' - struggle - fear - both sides of nature

  cyclical structure - back to the willow tree - safety

  everyday language - 'so it seemed' - declaimer - the poet knows better now then to mess with nature
• prelude - context


  Wordsworth -

  troubled relationship with parents (dead by teens) - sent to live with grandparents + uncle - abusive - meant he was outside a lot - felt like nature was his family - until this happened shows how it changed his life

  didn't like violence - was an early supporter of the French revolution but then hated it as many died as it got very very violent

  lake district - stole the boat - got traumatised