Mid-Term Break, Seamus Heaney

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Mid-Term Break – Seamus Heaney “Mid-Term Break” by Seamus Heaney is a poem which looks at the feelings and attitudes of a loss of a close relative using; word choice, alliteration, repetition, imagery and enjambment. It starts with the poet sitting in the college sick bay waiting to be picked up, he gets picked up by his neighbours and when he gets home his father is crying and old men say they were “Sorry for his loss”. An ambulance arrives with a body which is his little brothers who was killed when he was hit by a car. He doesn’t accept that it is his brother until the next day when he sees him for the first time for six weeks. Then the poem ends with maximum impact with the boy lying in a “four foot box, a foot for every year”. The first stanza appears innocent at first and idea which is carried on from the title. When you think of a “Mid-Term Break” you usually associate it with happiness, fun and relaxation. So when Heaney states “Counting … classes to a close” this carries on the idea of an exciting fun holiday. This notion is quickly changed when the reader is told that he waited “in the college sick bay” this is the first idea that something is wrong as it infers that something is wrong. This suggestion is backed up using onomatopoeia and word choices throughout stanza one, “bells knelling”, knelling bells, is an onomatopoeic effect, which are usually heard after a funeral, and so this gives the reader the idea that someone close to him has died. Heaney say that his “neighbours drove me home” and the end of stanza one. The choice of the word “neighbours” infers that something is definitely wrong so that his own parents can’t pick their son up from school. The shocking image of his “Father crying” at the start of stanza two means its no longer a hint that something is wrong as it takes a lot for an old man to cry. This apparent death is having
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