Summary
The speaker carries on talking about how the island doesn't have any trees. If it did have trees, they might actually feel like company, blowing around in the storm's wind, and creating noise. The sound of the storm shaking the leaves and branches would be a welcome distraction from the sound of it trying to destroy the islanders' homes.
Analysis
Here, our attention turns from the island itself to the storm that's about to attack it. Seamus Heaney isn't known as an especially political poet, but it's likely that the Irish poet meant "Storm on the Island" as a subtle commentary on the violence consuming Ireland in the late twentieth century, and on the English colonial rule of Ireland. Like the island in the poem, Ireland was seen as a proud but beleaguered country able to weather terrifying storms in the form of colonialism and war. The word "island" in the poem's title sounds quite a bit like the word "Ireland," as well as evoking Ireland's island setting. This reading of the poem makes Heaney's characterization of the storm an interesting one. The storm is destructive, but it isn't personified. In fact, any possibility of personalization is stripped away: the storm is referred to with the pronoun "it," and is even called "a thing," as if the speaker is trying to emphasize that it lacks a will of its own. If the storm symbolizes war, it symbolizes war as an abstract threat, not in the form of any particular enemy. It's as if the enemy is violence itself, which is destructive regardless of who is causing it or why—and which, in the case of the conflict in Ireland, can be self-perpetuating long after the initial impetus for it.
In this symbolic reading, it's interesting to consider whether the trees also have symbolic significance. The trees in this part of the poem are described as objects that don't exist on the island, but that would be immediately pummeled by the storm if they did, creating both more chaos and a welcome distraction from the storm's severest dangers. Perhaps it makes sense to think of the trees as the fruits of wealth and peace—luxuries that Ireland didn't have much of at the time, and that the poem's island doesn't have either. The "storm" of war and conflict might destroy frivolous things before it causes any real harm, which is frightening in itself, but also makes the threat that conflict poses to human life seem less immediate. However, the islanders don't have the luxury of distraction, which means that they're hyper-prepared for the storm. Similarly, Heaney suggests, Ireland itself is a bit of a hardscrabble place, in large part because of the same political conflicts and hierarchies that continued to wreak havoc there. Thus, its people are, Heaney hints, prepared to defend the essentials. Paradoxically, in other words, the same hardship that now threatens the people of the island (and by extension the people of Ireland) has made them ideally suited to survive hardship.
This section of the poem also displays some striking examples of enjambment. An enjambed line of poetry is one that ends in the middle of a sentence or phrase, creating both suspense and a feeling of abruptness. Here phrases like "full/blast" and "leaves and branches/can raise" are split down the middle, broken up as if torn by the storm's winds. Even while maintaining its steady iambic pentameter rhythm, this part of the poem uses enjambed lines to reveal the chaos and disturbance of the storm. Indeed, the combination of reliable iambic pentameter and line breaks, which inject uncertainty into that iambic pentameter, is a visceral way of getting across the clash between the island's bare, solid landscape and the storm's destructive power.
