Where It All Goes Down
Put away your wayfarer sunglasses. This is not that kind of island. But, as the title suggests, this poem does take place on an island. The island, we slowly find out, is not a tropical paradise, but a dried-up, harsh place, prone to violent storms: "there are no stacks/ Or stooks that can be lost. Nor are there trees" (4-5).
So, this is not exactly a vacation destination. From Heaney's description, we find out there is no hay (or any crops for that matter) or trees. We've just got the simple, "squat," sturdy houses that the island's inhabitants built for protection from the harsh elements. There are also cliffs where the angry sea sprays up violently—"like a tame cat/ Turned savage" to be exact (15-16). We might venture a guess that this is an Irish island (Heaney's an Irishman, after all) where the weather is tough and the people are even tougher.
While all signs point to Heaney's homeland, Ireland, he does make a few attempts at universality to ensure that all of his readers can get into this one. When he writes "You might think," you can't help but feel you're being addressed directly. And the final line, that "huge nothing that we fear," could easily stand in for the huge, mysterious, sometimes unnamable fill-in-the-blank-here that any one of us fears (in this case: Mother Nature). Heaney is able to delicately balance between being completely embedded in a place and its community (the "us"), while still dragging his readers into the mix so that we're hooked—and implicated—throughout the poem.