Description Of The Storm And Nature example essay topic

The descriptive poem written by Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Theodore Roethke, deals with an aggressive storm and all its effects on the environment: the surrounding nature and the people experiencing it. The storm is described in a disorganized manner to highlight the big chaos the storm causes. Nature is precisely illustrated, because it reacts on the storm and thus is an important factor for the description of the storm. The people simply give an extra dimension to the poem, and the theme of men versus nature in the form of a storm.

As the title tells us, the poem is about a huge raging and destroying storm, going through a little town, 'up Santa Lucia'. The poet has chosen for an enormous unusual vocabulary of verbs to describe the storm: 'whines', 'whistling', 'rattling', 'flapping' and so on, although these words are not often used to describe events such as this hurricane. 'Whistling' for example has a rather soft connotation, however it is used to emphasize the rough storm, even though it has a noisy undertone and this is the case with the entire list of verbs used in by the poet. It is not only the title and the employed vocabulary that illustrate the storm in such an overwhelming and remarkable way; there is also the absence of any visible structure. The poem does not seem to contain any obvious rhyme scheme and definitely no direct rhyme. Stanzas appear to be absent and some lines are very short 'We wait, we listen. ', other lines are really long 'Flicking the foam from the whitecaps straight upwards into the darkness.

' Enjambment occurs several times: 'Then a crack of thunder, and the black rain runs over us, over / The flat-roofed houses, coming down in gusts, beating / The walls, the slatted windows, driving /... ', just as end-stopped lines 'Water roars in the cistern. ' The punctuation in the poem encloses no order either, there is commas and semi-colons, a question mark 'Where have the people gone?', an exclamation mark 'A time to go home!' and a hyphen 'Breathing heavily, hoping -'. There is also a strong contradiction in those two lines: 'While the wind whines overhead, / Coming down from the mountain,' the wind whines overhead but comes down. Roethke uses more of these oppositions in his poem such as 'The flat boom on the beach of the towering sea-swell', where flat and towering are fully in opposition to each other. In addition, less plain contradictions are used by the poet: 'and the black rain runs over us, over', rain usually comes down, but here it runs over the people and these two directions also seem to oppose.

All through the poem there are expressions, which totally contradict each other 'The storm lulls off, then redoubles', 'The bulb goes on and off', 'And the hurricane drives the dead straw into the living pine-tree. ' The poet chose for no rhyme scheme, the absence of stanzas, different lengths of lines, the contradictions and all the other mentioned elements to underline the chaos of the storm as much as possible. The climax of the storm unfolds from 'Then a crack of thunder', which contains the onomatopoeia 'crack' which refers to the sudden outburst of the storm, when it really starts and where it reaches its climax. Secondly, even though the poem's title seems to give the show away, seems to blab the poem's content, nature also has an important part in The Storm.

It starts with a detailed description of six lines that talk purely about nature. The poet emphasizes this pure nature with 'the stone breakwater', a combination of two elements of nature and 'the wind whines' that underlines the sound by the use of alliteration. Other sound effects are created by more alliterative repetition, 'whine of wires', also further in the poem, 'a steady sloshing of the swell', 'a fine fume of rain' and also by internal rhyme: 'a rattling and flapping of leaves'. Nature is always suffering by storms and hurricanes, and is always part of every storm, that is one of the reasons why the poet chose to describe nature so intensively.

Another reason for the poet to include nature into this poem, and why he included nature in many of his works, is that Roethke was born in Saginaw, Michigan, where both his father and his grandfather maintained greenhouses and he situated himself as a child in the midst of nature. Furthermore, the presence of people is shown occasionally through the lines or through the description of the storm and nature. There are different lines and words that give us hints about the presence of the people living there where the storm is wandering about. 'And the small streetlamp swinging and slamming against the lamp-pole. / Where have all the people gone?' are the first signs, next there is: 'one light on the mountain', 'a child', 'an alley', 'Santa Lucia', 'flat-roofed houses', 'The walls, the slatted windows', 'the last watcher', 'the cardplayer's' and so on.

These people are the population of Santa Lucia, which might be a fictitious town, an island or a peninsula, surrounded by a wild and angry sea. And storms like the one being described in the poem, seem to take place on a frequent base in Santa Lucia. It is not a little town where a hurricane occurs every decade. Theodore Roethke describes the hurricane in such an extremely real and believable manner, which may possibly suggest that he is an inhabitant of Santa Lucia or that the town truly is an invention and that he is part of the made up community. The unlike situation of a poet describing such a 'usual event' is easily explained by the reason that Roethke probably wants to share his experience that he has with these kind of tempests since he is a citizen of the stormy town of Santa Lucia, which experiences them regularly. So first, there is an instinctive feeling of fear by the population which is highlighted by the question 'Where have all the people gone?', which suggests panic.

Next, people get more relaxed with the storm 'And our breath comes more easy' and reach a point of inurement 'the cardplayer's' playing cards as if there is no threatening storm raging outside their safe 'flat-roofed houses'. At the end of the poem, the people from Santa Lucia arrive at the feeling of hope, 'Breathing heavily, hoping'. Moreover, the storm could stand in relation to the combination of men and nature, human versus their environment. People destroy nature and subsequently nature destroys the people.

The storm created by elements of nature destroys and revenges. Nature will win and yet the people will win; however, human will always lose. Because men can do whatever they want against nature, but once there is no nature left and we will die, so we need it. People are destroying the world, everything they do is so harmful to the environment and this might be the nature's answer to destroy human beings. The balance is kept through these sorts of storms and hurricanes. In conclusion, we can say that the poet has not used a simple and visual structure to describe the storm, but combined all different kinds of line-lengths, words and punctuation to underline the chaos a hurricane creates.

In addition, he played with sounds and verbs to give the storm and the poem its noisy undertone. Therefore, on the one hand the poem seems unstructured, on the other hand when we analyse it further we do recognise a certain structure. Nature appears everywhere in the poem, since nature always reacts on storms and for the reason that nature is important in the poet's life. And finally, the presence of the people gives the poem an extra dimension on how they experience the storm and even seems to lead to an eternal triangle between the storm, men and nature.