Summary
The poem “Hurricane Hits England” by Grace Nichols consists of eight stanzas written in free verse. The first stanza is written in an omniscient perspective, describing a woman in the third person. The hurricane is what brought the woman closer to the landscape. She lays awake for half the night. The angry, howling wind resembles a dark, ancestral ghost which is both scary and reassuring.
The second stanza switches to dialogue, presumably spoken by the woman. She asks the gods Huracan, Oya, and Shango to talk to her. She also asks her cousin Hattie back home to talk to her.
She then asks them why they would visit England (with the storm). She asks for the meaning of their old voices causing chaos and destruction in a new place. She describes blinding light in the midst of the darkness of the storm. She asks what is the purpose of falling trees. In the single-line sixth stanza, she asks why her own heart is “unchained.”
In the seventh stanza, she declares that she is aligning herself to Oya, the god of the weather, so that she can follow the movement of the winds and ride the mystery of the storm.
She welcomes this “sweet” mystery in order to break the “frozen lake” within her and shake the foundations of the trees within her. The mystery will also inform and remind her that “the earth is the earth is the earth.”
