A Comparison of Midterm Break and The Early Purges

A Comparison of Midterm Break and The Early Purges

For this assignment we have studied two poems by Seamus Heaney. Both

of these poems are linked because they are about Heaney’s early

memories of death and how he coped with these difficult situations

when he was a young.

The subject matter of the poem ‘Midterm Break’ is about his brother’s

death. It also tells us about his feelings about this death. Heaney is

away at boarding school. Waiting in the college sick bay. Heaney

writes ‘At two ‘o’ clock our neighbours drove me home’. Which shows

that his parents were unable to come to pick him up as they might have

been held up with something.

Heaney wanted to express his feelings, to let us know what he felt

like having to cope with the death of his little brother. It must have

been a particularly difficult situation for him.

There is a lot of sadness in the poem from the beginning. Heaney

writes of ‘bells knelling classes to a close’. ‘Knelling is a sound of

funeral bells, not a school bell. This indicates that Heaney is going

to a funeral. The first person he encounters is his farther ‘crying’,

this is an unusual sight for him. “He always took funerals in his

stride”. This shows he’s been to other funerals, but he has not been

affected in the same way. Heaney also remembers a family friend

commenting on the death as a ‘hard blow’. This means harsh/unexpected

also it is an unfortunate pun as his brother has also suffered a

‘blow’. Heaney feels uncomfortable when older men stand up to shake

his hand. They say to Heaney ‘sorry for my trouble’, the word

‘trouble’ again seems insubstantial. He has to cope with strangers and

whispers from the people that don’t know him. He holds his mothers

hand but she c...

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...rites in the fourth stanza that he

was frightened; this contrasts greatly with dans attitude. Heaney

‘sadly hangs around the yard’ for some time afterwards. Heaney forgets

this image but it comes back to him when he sees Dan killing other

animals. He appears to have come to term with the farmyard slaughter

when he grows up. Heaney writes ‘it makes sense’, this suggests the

same cold-hearted views as Dan taggart. The last line suggests that

Heaney realises now that some animals are pests. He still does not

forget the unsettling incident when he was younger.

Both poems show how Heaney deals with death. The death of animals as

well as his brother affected him. In one poem he is dealing with an

accident, a death and also peoples reactions. In this poem he deals

with deliberate killing of animals, this is a colder, harder poem and

it is also unsentimental.