The poem “Mid-Term Break” by Seamus Heaney, Irish poet and Nobel Prize recipient, is the story of sorrow and forced growing up (Heaney). The verse about a little boy who faces the death for the first time is enriched by the use of bright imagery, specific verse structure and the narration from the first person. Death is something unfamiliar to the little boy, and narrator is trying to figure out how to behave in this situation and what everybody expects of him. The poet shows the complicated inner feelings of a child who faces the adult world and realizes the shortness of life.
In the beginning, the promising title of the poem gives a hint of something pleasant, such as the end of school, summer or holidays. However, very quickly it appears to be sarcastic, as the end of school is forced by the sorrow: “counting bells knelling classes to a close” (2). The word “knelling” is used about the bells that ring when someone has died. In the first lines, the author already creates the image of time and death. A boy is counting the bells as he thinks that they will lead to something good, “the classes will close” (2), and he will be able to have fun. Nevertheless, he is still too young to understand that every ring of the bell shortens our lives. The direct time mentioned only strengthens this image: “at two o'clock our neighbors drove me home” (3).
In the following stanzas, the boy is taken home, where he meets his relatives and faces their reaction to the death. The first one, is his father who is on the porch crying. The situation makes the boy embarrassed, as men are not supposed to cry (4). The baby “cooed and laughed” (7) as she was too young to understand what has happened and this fact protected her. An interesting episode is when men are standing up to shake the boy’s hand as if he is the eldest: “By old men standing up to shake my hand, / And tell me they were 'sorry for my trouble'./ Whispers informed strangers I was the eldest” (9-11). This moment creates a deep metaphor and rich imagery of the verse. At first, the boy does not understand why he should listen to these condolences. He is not ready. He is just a little boy, and he cannot believe his brother is dead. This shows the cruelness of the adults, who are faceless and nameless strangers just making some traditional routine. It is accepted to express one's sorrow when someone dies, for that reason, all these people are shaking the hand of the boy without understanding what they are doing.
The end of the verse where the boy sees his little brother “paler” and finally understands what has happened is filled with the numbers: “At ten o'clock the ambulance arrived” (14), “For the first time in six weeks” (18), “He lay in the four-foot box” (20). This verse is like a countdown of life. The author implies to show the story of every human who comes to this world as a little boy and is always unready to face the sorrow and death. Only with the time, one gets used to tell and hear condolences, count bells, and comes to the understanding that our life can be as short as “a four-foot box.”
This verse consists of five tercets and the concluding line. There are practically no traces of rhyme, despite the half-rhyme in the fifth stanza: corpse/nurses, sigh/arrived (13-15). The verse is written from the first person, which adds intimacy to the feelings of the narrator. The little boy tells his story and gradually the reader traces the changes in his mind and the perception of the world.
Seamus Heaney also creates very strong imagery with the help of stylistic devices. The verse is rich in metaphors (“bells knelling classes to a close”, “Whispers informed”, “foot for every year”, etc.) and contrasts (“And candles soothed the bedside; I saw him”, In the porch I met my father crying/ The baby cooed and laughed and rocked the pram). The other examples of stylistic devices: parallelism in lines 7-8: “The baby cooed and laughed and rocked the pram/ When I came in, and I was embarrassed” and the epithet “gaudy scars”.
The analysis of the “Mid-Term Break” by Seamus Heaney consists of three stages. In the beginning, I have read the poem several times to understand its meaning and implicit intentions of the author. The thoughts provoked are reflected in the first part of this analysis. I was trying to find something hidden besides the obvious sorrow depicted in the poem, and I have found that the life is always too short. The writer puts himself in the shoes of that boy and tells the reader that a person can never be ready to face death and to understand life. The following stage of my research was to learn about the structure of the poem and define whether it has certain rhyme and rhythm. At the concluding step of the research, I again made a close reading of the text, trying to find some stylistic devices and to understand why the poet used them in the context. This approach has helped me to write a deep and detailed analysis of the verse “Mid-Term Break.”
Works cited
Heaney, Seamus. “The Mid-term Break.” Poetry Foundation. Web. 27 March. 2016.
