Séamus Heaney's Mid-Term Break
Séamus Heaney's "Mid-Term Break" is among the few poems that have emotionally moved me. The writer uses many techniques including similes, metaphors and beautiful lexical choice to convey the sombre and miserable situation of his brother's death. In this essay I am going to analyse the language of the poem and discuss, in more detail, the techniques used to convey the real sadness of the situation.
"Mid-Term Break" is a very emotive poem in which Séamus Heaney reflects on the untimely demise of his little brother Christopher and explains what was going through his mind at that time. The poem's title suggests a holiday but this "break" does not happen for pleasant reasons. For most of the poem Heaney writes of people's differing reactions and at the end he is able to grieve honestly. In the poem Heaney travels home from school to attend the funeral of his 4-year old brother who was killed in a tragic accident. During the funeral Heaney is confronted with many issue's that make him feel uneasy while he still struggles to come to terms with the incident that stands before him: the death of his little brother!
In this poem, the writer uses many techniques to express the misery of the situation. The writer uses effective word choice in the first stanza.
"I sat all morning in the college sick bay
Counting bells knelling classes to a close"
Here we can see that the word "all" suggests that Heaney's time waiting seems intermiable which adds to the sadness of the situation. Furthermore the "counting" of the bells advocates that Heaney is bored but also implies that he is desperate to leave school which creates a very tense atmosphere. In addition the word "knelling" ironically suggests...
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...his poem and as a result successfully conveyed the sadness and misery of losing a loved one. I particularly was moved when he used a simile to describe his brother as sleeping rather than dead; it portrayed his brother as an innocent little boy. Moreover, when he created a soft image of a hideous scar I was touched as he obviously loved his brother to a great extent. I sympathise with Heaney to a great length as it is a tragic loss to lose a family member especially if it is someone you are exceptionally close to like a brother or sister. This poem has revealed to me the true significance of life and also the unimaginable pain of death. This poem has made me realise that you do not properly appreciate something until it is gone. In light of this I have learned that you should always respect and treat one another well as you never know when their time will come!
My initial response to the poem was a deep sense of empathy. This indicated to me the way the man’s body was treated after he had passed. I felt sorry for him as the poet created the strong feeling that he had a lonely life. It told us how his body became a part of the land and how he added something to the land around him after he died.
In her poem entitled “The Poet with His Face in His Hands,” Mary Oliver utilizes the voice of her work’s speaker to dismiss and belittle those poets who focus on their own misery in their writings. Although the poem models itself a scolding, Oliver wrote the work as a poem with the purpose of delivering an argument against the usage of depressing, personal subject matters for poetry. Oliver’s intention is to dissuade her fellow poets from promoting misery and personal mistakes in their works, and she accomplishes this task through her speaker’s diction and tone, the imagery, setting, and mood created within the content of the poem itself, and the incorporation of such persuasive structures as enjambment and juxtaposition to bolster the poem’s
In Seamus Heaney’s poetry, there is a recurring theme of his talking of the past, and more predominantly about significant moments in time, where he came to realisations that brought him to adulthood. In “Death of a Naturalist” Heaney describes a moment in his childhood where he learnt that nature was not as beautiful as seem to be when he was just a naive child. Heaney does this on a deeper level in “Midterm Break” describes his experience of his younger brothers funeral and the mixed, confusing feelings he encountered, consequently learning that he no longer was a child, and had no choice but to be exposed to reality. Robert Frost in one sense also describes particular moments in time, where his narrator comes to realisations. However, Frost writes more indirectly than Heaney, and all together more metaphorically. In “A Leaf Treader” he symbolically talks about life and death through the autumn season. He does the same, in “The Road Not Taken” where the two roads are described to be a metaphor for the decisions one makes in life, and the inevitable regrets we face due to those decisions. In “Stopping by a Woods on a Snowy Evening” Frost directly talks directly of a moment in time, however the significant meaning being that in life one needs a moment of solace to appreciate peace and beauty.
John Keats’s illness caused him to write about his unfulfillment as a writer. In an analysis of Keats’s works, Cody Brotter states that Keats’s poems are “conscious of itself as the poem[s] of a poet.” The poems are written in the context of Keats tragically short and painful life. In his ...
In “The Despairing Lover” William Walsh sets out the poem like a story with a beginning a middle and an end. This narrative structure of the poem gives the poem three clear stages this making the poem clearer to the reader and enables the poets written words to portray his ideas with the poem. In the first stanza William Walsh is seen to be in ‘anguish’ over his loss of his lover. However in the second stanza his mood swings to being just unhappy to suicidal, “it’s torment projecting and sadly reflecting’. This also shows how the poet William
The poem's speaker mistreated,gloomy and being isolated. She is a person who loss and assimilation if not loose your self. “That this
Dave Lucas’s “November” and Mark Bibbins’ “Groupie” have similar themes and tone but different topics, settings, and poetic stylings. These poems express the melancholy of unrelated endings. By exploring the poet’s goals and examining theme, tone, poetic diction, end-stop, enjambment, and use of color in imagery, the reader can see how the poems reflect each other in their exploration of mournful endings.
I will discuss the similarities by which these poems explore themes of death and violence through the language, structure and imagery used. In some of the poems I will explore the characters’ motivation for targeting their anger and need to kill towards individuals they know personally whereas others take out their frustration on innocent strangers. On the other hand, the remaining poems I will consider view death in a completely different way by exploring the raw emotions that come with losing a loved one.
but you may not notice the change in perspectives until Heaney writes ‘But today it is my father who keeps stumbling……. And will not go away’ this line shows that the son who was always the one tripping and falling and lagging behind his father is finally the one in the lead. But the poem further stats that the son is getting irritated by the father because he won’t go away, he finally understands that this is what he was like to him when he was younger.
In Funeral Rites, Heaney demonstrates his fascination for death, and alludes to the fitting customs accompanying it, while only briefly referencing the violence in Ireland caused by the civil war. This is contrasted deeply with the rest of North, as Heaney shifts from the representation of death as natural and customary in Part One, to savage and sanguinary in Part Two.
After blunt comparison of the images of “home again” (11) and “how lonely” (12), the poem impulses into our perceptive of a final solace. In its astonishing attempt, the poem captures, and informs the reader that a certain aspect of solitude come with all of us. But this sadness comes grounded between “heading home again” (11) and “your place/in the family of thing” (16-17) and outcries similar to the geese, at the opening and ending of a period of bitter and darkness. That outcry consistently heard distant and high above provides the poem well as its essential metaphor. Merely, it also serves the reader as well.
Ever since children are young growing up and becoming an adult is something that children cannot wait for while it is something their parents dread. Seamus Heaney published his poem Follower in 1966 in his book Death of a Naturalist. Follower mostly takes place in the past where Heaney viewed his father as role model and wanted to be like him. Heaney was his father's shadow, but as time progressed his father then in turn became his follower and his shadow. Heaney published another poem titled The Harvest Bow in 1979. In The Harvest Bow Heaney talks about his memories of his father plating and making a bow out of wheat, something he did very often
Big Jim Evans saying it was a hard blow?, leads me to believe that Big
In the poem “A song of Despair” Pablo Neruda chronicles the reminiscence of a love between two characters, with the perspective of the speaker being shown in which the changes in their relationship from once fruitful to a now broken and finished past was shown. From this Neruda attempts to showcase the significance of contrasting imagery to demonstrate the Speaker’s various emotions felt throughout experience. This contrasting imagery specifically develops the reader’s understanding of abandonment, sadness, change, and memory. The significant features Neruda uses to accomplish this include: similes, nautical imagery, floral imagery, and apostrophe.
Funeral Blues by W. H. Auden is a short poem that illustrates the emotions that he is dealing with after the love of his life passes away. The tone of this piece evokes feelings that will differ depending on the reader; therefore, the meaning of this poem is not in any way one-dimensional, resulting in inevitable ambiguity . In order to evoke emotion from his audience, Auden uses a series of different poetic devices to express the sadness and despair of losing a loved one. This poem isn’t necessarily about finding meaning or coming to some overwhelming realization, but rather about feeling emotions and understanding the pain that the speaker is experiencing. Through the use of poetic devices such as an elegy, hyperboles, imagery, metaphors, and alliterations as well as end-rhyme, Auden has created a powerful poem that accurately depicts the emotions a person will often feel when the love of their live has passed away.