In the poem “Storm Warnings” by Adrienne Rich, a storm beats
down on a house while the people inside struggle to last through the storm.
The poem
begins by setting up the scene, saying “glass had been falling all afternoon”.
This shows that the storm had been going on for long time, and the rain had
been falling so hard that it sounded like glass on the windows. The narrator
describes the storm as having winds that “are walking overhead”, showing the
amplified sound of the thunder. Clouds are described as “gray unrest…moving
across the sky”. This shows the constant movement of the grey storm clouds.
In the
second stanza, it becomes clear that the narrator is talking about a hurricane
when she says the storm “moves inward towards the silent core of waiting”.
Here, she is talking about the eye of the hurricane, which is known for being
calm. These hurricanes are often and unexpected, shown through the narrator’s
description of the hurricanes coming “regardless of prediction”.
The narrator says that the only
thing her family can do for protection against storm is to “close the
shutters”. Time and special weather-proof glass cannot alter the course of the
storm, nor can they make the storm go by any faster.
As
night falls, the narrator draws the curtains and lights candles, while trying
to keep out “the insistent whine of weather through the unsealed aperture”. However,
despite the precautions, they are also the narrator’s “sole defense against the
season”. When talking about the “season”, the narrator is referring to
hurricane season. The narrator ends the poem with the statement: “These are the
things that we have learned to do who live in the troubled regions”. From this
statement, it is made even clearer that the narrator lives in an area that is
frequently plagued by massive hurricanes. However, the narrator’s community,
shown through the use of the pronoun “we”, has learned how to cope with the
storms.
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