Within 'Storm on the Island' and 'Ozymandias', both poems detail the power of nature upon people, and how it can affect them. In 'Storm on the Island', Heaney describes how humans will always try to fight nature itself, always fighting an unwinnable war and how it affects communities, whereas Shelley describes nature as an ever-present constant to society, which not even human influence can overcome. In 'Storm on the Island', the first 2 lines dictates that ' We are prepared: we build our houses squat, /Sink walls in rock and roof them with good slate'. The inclusive 1st person pronoun 'We' and 'Our' highlights that, as a species, we are always fighting a constant battle with nature, no matter what we do, we must continuously fight, by building 'our houses squat', trying to protect ourselves from nature. Moreover, the first-person narrative of 'Storm on the Island' shows that nature, and its power, is a universal experience seen by every single person who has ever lived, and that the story can be told from the eyes of anyone. Furthermore, Heaney uses metaphors such as ‘leaves and branches/ Can raise a tragic chorus in a gale’. A chorus is a word used to act as narration in acting, and this therefore implies the leaves and branches move so violently, as if it is narrating a story of the weather, and that the effects of weather are frightening, even when it is nothing but ‘empty air’. Zooming into ‘- leaves and branches’, the dash is used to create a sense of space and emptiness, in an otherwise chaotic and highly descriptive environment. This is perhaps done, not only in conjunction with ‘empty air’ to provide some contrast between the heavily descriptive adjectives and verbs used, but to coincide with the semantic field of bareness and emptiness. This all leads back to the ideas of the power of nature and how we are always fighting to ensure that ensure that we as a species can survive and thrive under the influence of nature. Contextually speaking, the poem references the imminent arrival of The Troubles, which was a civil war in Ireland, with the poem written in 1962, tension was already brewing in the nation, leading to a large amount of unrest in the country, and the poem’s title “Storm on the Island”, references the NI parliament building “Stormont”, so Heaney not only describes nature’s powers’ , but uses this poem as a metaphor for the growing amount of tension within the Island. On the other hand, Shelly describes the story of an antique land and how the power of nature, and how human influence is only temporary. For example, the final line of the poem states that ‘ of the colossal wreck, lay boundless and bare,/ the lone and level sands stretch far away.’ The adjective ‘colossal’ highlights not only the size of the statue, but also the size of the kingdom the Ozymandias once had, that in a way, was a metaphor for how we are all doomed to face the power of nature. This is similar to Storm on the Island, wherein Heaney describes how “ we build our houses in a squat”, in order to protect ourselves from the inevitable, but eventually we will succumb to our nature.