‘Storm Warnings’ is taken from Rich’s first collection of poetry, A Change of World, and can be classified as a dramatic lyric poem. Rich was only twenty-one when she published this volume, which is surprising when you consider the mature outlook of this poem. ‘Storm Warnings’ is a more personal poem than the other two poems from A Change of World on the course (‘Aunt Jennifer’s Tigers’ and ‘The Uncle Speaks in the Drawing Room’), and it gives us some important insights into Rich’s personality, and how she sometimes struggled with her emotions and moods.
In the first stanza Rich expertly creates a sense of anticipation for what is to come. We learn that the barometer ‘has been falling all afternoon’, so a storm is certainly on the way, but it is the speaker’s unease which is more compelling. She claims to know what is coming ‘better than the instrument’, and uses alliteration and personification to describes the winds ‘walking overhead’. The powerful phrase ‘gray unrest’ conjures up the image of a storm and a sense of unease. Despite the speaker’s anxiety and foreboding, she is also fascinated. She walks from window to window so she can see the sky from different angles and how the trees struggle with the weather: ‘Boughs strain against the sky’.
In the second stanza the speaker reflects upon the fact that storms do not come out of nowhere. For any natural disaster, such as a hurricane or a tornado, to occur, a range of very particular things have to happen. Often they have been building for a long time, waiting for the precise moment when all the specific conditions are in place, and then the storm erupts: ‘with a single purpose time has traveled/ By secret currents of the undiscerned/ Into this polar realm’. The poem becomes deeper with the speaker’s realisation that: ‘Weather abroad/ And weather in the heart alike come on/ Regardless of prediction.’ Just as we cannot predict the weather with any certainty, nor can we predict the emotional ‘storms’ that we may experience. In fact, we often react to life events in surprising and unexpected ways.
