Summary
After previously describing how trees might be a distraction from the storm's threat, the speaker sets us straight. There are no trees or other sheltering structures outside, and even the sea, beating against cliffs, doesn't offer the islanders any companionship. Instead, the sea's water gets picked up in the storm and hits the windows of the islanders' houses, as if a cat is spitting on them.
Analysis
The poem's speaker is a "we," a defined and unified group, but in the world of "Storm on the Island" it's the "we" against the world. Heaney begins this part of the poem by bluntly clarifying that there are in fact no trees on the island. As a matter of fact, there's not much of anything, other than the people who live on the island and the homes they've built. And, these lines make clear, the people can trust only one another and things that they've made themselves. Not only does the storm threaten from outside, but the storm turns other external forces against the islanders, incorporating the surrounding sea into its attack. In other words, the storm has the power to take things that are neutral or friendly-seeming—"comfortable," in the words of the poem—and render them dangerous. This makes the poem's use of the second person quite dramatic. A phrase like "You might think that the sea is company" actually pulls the reader into this binary, good-vs.-evil conflict, as if the speaker is asking the "you" to take sides. If we read the poem literally, this is a way to make the reader feel involved and build the poem's emotional intensity. If we read the poem as an allegorical commentary on Irish politics, then it's also a way to ask for the reader's political sympathies, suggesting that it's not possible to stay neutral in such a conflict: you either stand with the people who need your help, or you don't.
The storm—a violent manifestation of the external world beyond the island—hasn't yet been personified. Up until this point, it's as if Heaney is purposely placing blame on an ambient destructiveness rather than any individual or group. However, that begins to shift slightly here. As the storm becomes more of a threat, and as Heaney portrays it with increasing vividness, it is personified through figurative language, so that it begins to seem actively malicious. Its violence begins to seem personal and willful rather than random. Heaney creates this sense in part through the use of simile: the phrase "spits like a tame cat" imbues the inanimate storm with the abilities and attributes of a living thing. This, the most vivid figurative language we've encountered so far, completely shifts the characterization of the storm and makes it feel much more like a traditional antagonist—a character of its own.
Punctuation and line breaks also play a role in shifting our perspective on the storm. In this segment of the poem, Heaney uses these tools to make the storm seem less random and more spiteful. By combining enjambed and end-stopped lines, he also adds complexity to the reader's perception of the storm. Enjambed lines like "the flung spray hits/the very windows," as discussed earlier, evoke the storm's sheer unpredictability and its capacity to destroy (in this case, the thing being destroyed is the sentence itself). But dramatically end-stopped lines start to appear here in ways we haven't yet seen. Look at the line "But there are no trees, no natural shelter." This line, slowed down by a comma and brought to a halt with a period, has a drama of its own, slower and more deliberate-feeling than the enjambed lines. It feels almost like an evocation of the storm's scheming, once again making us feel that the storm has a kind of mental power in addition to pure brute force.
