The power of nature
Even though this poem can be understood as an extended metaphor for conflict in Ireland, it is also, on its more literal level, an exploration of the sheer destructive power of the natural world. The verbs that Heaney uses to characterize the storm in this poem—pummel, hits, spits, dive, strafe, and bombard—evoke violence and force. Indeed, some of these verbs even borrow language from the world of war and militarism, suggesting that nature is capable of destruction that otherwise can only be achieved by a literal army. The speaker's observation that the storm is simultaneously a thing of immense power and nothing at all emphasizes that much of nature's power comes from its unpredictability and mystery. While humans might need military technology and strength to cause such impact, nature can cause it without any visible tools or effort at all.
Fear
Fear is the primary force governing the lives of the island's people. Though a storm may strike only occasionally, the fear of storms dictates their lives, influencing how they build the most important thing they possess—their homes. It influences their attitudes as well. The speaker, and by extension all the people on the island, come across as hardscrabble and pragmatic, so much so that they use only the simplest and most efficient words and sentences available. Their words and ideas are as sturdy as their homes, all because they know, and fear, that something extremely destructive might at any time try to destroy them and everything they own. Heaney even uses the word "fear" twice in the short poem, once as the very last word—a sure sign of how much the emotion weighs on the speaker and the community. However, the word "fear" in the last line is rhymed with the word "air" in the preceding one, reminding readers that the island community fears the storm in spite of—or because of—its invisibility and impalpability.
Community
This poem is quite unusual in the way that the speaker most often uses the pronoun "we," implying that they speak for the entire community on the island. The people on the island exist, this usage implies, as a group, not as individuals, and every statement made about them in the poem refers to the group as a whole. Heaney suggests that this unbreakable sense of communal solidarity, in which no one person stands out above the others, is actually what keeps the island intact despite the onslaught of the storm. This solidarity is reflected in the landscape of the island itself, in which everything, houses included, is low and close to the ground: nothing stands taller than anything else in this flat, spare setting, just as no person sticks out as a protagonist or singular speaker. The very form of the poem even reflects these fundamental principles of unity and equality. It is all presented in one long stanza, and every single line is nearly identical in meter. This unity, as made visible and visceral by the poem's appearance on the page, acts like a solid wall keeping the island community intact.
