The Storm, Theodore Roethke

The descriptive poem written by Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Theodore Roethke, deals with an aggressive storm and all its effects on the environment: the surrounding nature and the people experiencing it. The storm is described in a disorganized manner to highlight the big chaos the storm causes. Nature is precisely illustrated, because it reacts on the storm and thus is an important factor for the description of the storm. The people simply give an extra dimension to the poem, and the theme of men versus nature in the form of a storm.

As the title tells us, the poem is about a huge raging and destroying storm, going through a little town, 'up Santa Lucia'. The poet has chosen for an enormous unusual vocabulary of verbs to describe the storm: 'whines', 'whistling', 'rattling', 'flapping' and so on, although these words are not often used to describe events such as this hurricane. 'Whistling' for example has a rather soft connotation, however it is used to emphasize the rough storm, even though it has a noisy undertone and this is the case with the entire list of verbs used in by the poet.

It is not only the title and the employed vocabulary that illustrate the storm in such an overwhelming and remarkable way; there is also the absence of any visible structure. The poem does not seem to contain any obvious rhyme scheme and definitely no direct rhyme. Stanzas appear to be absent and some lines are very short 'We wait, we listen.', other lines are really long 'Flicking the foam from the whitecaps straight upwards into the darkness.' Enjambment occurs several times: 'Then a crack of thunder, and the black rain runs over us, over / The flat-roofed houses, coming down in gusts, beating / The walls, the slatted windows, driving / ...', just as end-stopped lines 'Water roars in the cistern.' The punctuation in the poem encloses no order either, there is commas and semi-colons, a question mark 'Where have the people gone?', an exclamation mark 'A time to go home!' and a hyphen 'Breathing heavily, hoping -'. There is also a strong contradiction in those two lines: 'While the wind whines overhead, / Coming down from the mountain,' the wind whines overhead but comes down. Roethke uses more of these oppositions in his poem such as 'The flat boom on the beach of the towering sea-swell', where flat and towering are fully in opposition to each other. In addition, less plain contradictions are used by the poet: 'and the black rain runs over us, over', rain usually comes down, but here it runs over the people and these two directions also seem to oppose. All through the poem there are expressions, which totally contradict each other 'The storm lulls off, then redoubles', 'The bulb goes on and off', 'And the hurricane drives the dead straw into the living pine-tree.' The poet chose for no rhyme scheme, the absence of stanzas, different lengths of lines, the contradictions and all the other mentioned elements to underline the chaos of the storm as much as possible.

The climax of the storm unfolds from 'Then a crack of thunder', which contains the onomatopoeia 'crack' which refers to the sudden outburst of the storm, when it really starts and where it reaches its climax.

Secondly, even though the poem's title seems to give the show away, seems to blab the poem's content, nature also has an important part in The Storm. It starts with a detailed description of six lines that talk purely about nature. The poet emphasizes this pure nature with 'the stone breakwater', a combination of two elements of nature and 'the wind whines' that underlines the sound by the use of alliteration. Other sound effects are created by more alliterative repetition, 'whine of wires', also further in the poem, 'a steady sloshing of the swell', 'a fine fume of rain' and also by internal rhyme: 'a rattling and flapping of leaves'. Nature is always suffering by storms and hurricanes, and is always part of every storm, that is one of the reasons why the poet chose to describe nature so intensively. Another reason for the poet to include nature into this poem, and why he included nature in many of his works, is that Roethke was born in Saginaw, Michigan, where both his father and his grandfather maintained greenhouses and he situated himself as a child in the midst of nature.

Furthermore, the presence of people is shown occasionally through the lines or through the description of the storm and nature. There are different lines and words that give us hints about the presence of the people living there where the storm is wandering about. 'And