Compare thepoems 'Out, Out' by Robert Frost and 'Mid Term Break' by Seamus Heaney

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Compare the poems ‘Out, Out’ by Robert Frost and ‘Mid Term Break’ by Seamus Heaney

The poems ‘Out, Out’ by Robert Frost and ‘Mid Term Break’ by Seamus Heaney both contain many similarities and differences. Both poems tackle the issue of child death, although both from very different perspectives. ‘Mid Term Break’ has a much more personal approach to the subject as the narrative character is the brother of the deceased as opposed to in ‘Out, Out’ where the narrator is detached from the characters, being an outsider. ‘Out, Out’ tells of the events surrounding the death of the child whereas ‘Mid Term Break’ concentrates on the effects of the child’s death on the family and the accident itself is not actually seen.

         The title of both poems illustrate how although the children in the poems are dead their lives seemed incomplete as ‘Out, Out’ is an unfinished quote from the play Macbeth and ‘Mid Term Break’ shows that the term is not yet over. This seems to be the theme that both poems focus on, the pointlessness of the deaths suffered. Both of the deaths in the poems were at the hand of machine. In ‘Out, Out’ it was the ‘buzz saw’ and in ‘Mid Term Break’, ‘the bumper knocked him clear’ suggests he was killed by a car or some kind of vehicle. This could suggest how man made machines are becoming more widely used and men may soon become expendable.  

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        Throughout ‘Out, Out’ the ‘buzz saw’ is personified to sound like an angry, hungry animal. The poem seems to be loosely based around the boy’s connection with this saw and it is crucial to the poem. Words like ‘snarled’ and ‘rattled’, give the reader a vicious image, which creates an uneasy feeling. ‘Mid Term Break’ also manages to create an uneasy feeling from the first line also. The poem begins by saying the narrator is sitting in the ‘college sick bay’, which straight away gives the impression something is wrong.

The structure of both poems is very different. In ‘Out, ...

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