The Narrator, Nature, and Discord: How Poetic Technique Shapes Meaning in "The Storm" Amelie Maurice-Jones 12th Grade

In ‘The Storm’, Mansfield suggests that the bonds between humanity and nature have the potential to be both destructive and unifying. The adjective ‘breathless’ and past participle ‘half sobbing’ when paired on the second line dramatise the narrator’s loss of human physicality, and the latter action ‘I put my arms round a tree’ might be read as an appeal to nature to fulfil her incomplete identity, with the encasement of the phrase with pronoun ‘I’ and noun ‘tree’ reinforcing the interconnection between the individual and the natural world.

The poet’s constant fluctuation between description of humanity and the environment further depicts the identity of the speaker as inseparable from her surroundings, and the increasing personification of the weather (‘sprang’, ‘lashed’, ‘pulled’) draws attention to nature’ adoption of human traits, which is advanced through the closing description of trees that ‘swung’ and ‘laughed’- verbs which pinpoint a departure from the human control evident in the opening active voice ‘I ran’. Indeed, Mansfield’s decision to open with the personal pronoun ‘I’ yet close through natural imagery further amplifies the link between the poet and her respective surroundings, and whilst the repetition of the...