How is the structure in the poem Island Man important to the Island man?
The first stanza of five lines tells us that it is morning and that the man hears the sounds of the island ‘in his head’ as he wakes up. These are the sounds of nature, of the sea: ‘blue surf’ and waves ‘breaking and wombing’. Wombing is an unusual verb used by Shakespeare to mean ‘enclosing’; it is the final word of the first stanza but leads through enjambment to the ‘wild seabirds’ in the first line of the second stanza, as if the sea is about to give birth to the birds. In stanza two, which is six lines long, Nichols continues the theme of dreaming about the island as the fisherman set out to sea and the sun rises ‘defiantly’ (in contrast to London weather, of course). The images are again based in nature, and the colours in these initial stanzas are rich and beautiful: ‘blue surf’ and ‘his small emerald island’. Stanza two ends, however, with the phrase that tells us how the man has to emerge from his dream ‘groggily groggily’; these words set to one side to emphasise that the dre
