Comparing 'Snowdrops' and 'Mid-termbreak'

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 Comparing ‘Snowdrops’ and ‘Mid-term break’

Leslie Norris’ story ‘Snowdrops’ and Seamus Heaney’s poem ‘Mid-term break’ are both poems and stories about people dealing with death. The writer’s main ideas in both poems/stories are to focus on death, unexpected events and new experiences. There is a link between the two of them, as they are both taken from points of view of people having to deal with death or try to understand it, in different ways.

 The story titled ‘Snowdrops’ by Leslie Norris is about a teacher losing her boyfriend, who is killed in a motorcycle accident. The poem is taken from the point of view of one of the pupils in her class. The child is very young and naïve and it describes how the child is excited about going to see the snowdrops in the school garden. The brother of the child that has just died writes the poem ‘Mid-term break’ by Seamus Heaney and from this poem it shows the feelings that go through a person’s mind when someone in their family has died. The title for the story ‘Snowdrops’ doesn’t really signify that the story is going to be about death, and this is true of the poem ‘mid-term break’. The reader expects the poem to be about having fun, perhaps about a school holiday, the title certainly doesn’t give the poem away. The plot of the poem was quite clever because the poem starts with the boy waiting in the sick bay at college, but he is unaware of the reason he being taken home.

 We only find out that the poem is about a death by the way that it says in the second stanza;

“In the porch I met my father crying

He had always taken funerals in his stride”

We know that this poem is about dying, but you don’t actually know who has died until the seventh stanza, right at the very end. The last line tells us that the child was four years of age by saying:

“A four foot box, a foot for every year”

I do not think that the plot of the story ‘snowdrops’ is very effective because the plot is much longer and there are a lot of characters compared to the poem ‘mid-term break’. Also the poem by Seamus Heaney keeps you in suspense more, because you want to find out who has died, with the story ‘snowdrops’ you already know who has died and doesn’t really keep you wanting to know anything. I also think that ‘mid-term break’ appeals to your emotions much more, but I think that you can understand the story ‘snowdrops’ because there is simple descriptive writing used to display the fact that the story was written about and from the point of view from a small child. Also the ending to ‘snowdrops’ the boy finds out that what is actually happening, that there is a death and then they young boy realises why miss Webster has been acting so strange recently.

 The main reason for the title to be ‘snowdrops’ is that the boy wants to go and see the snowdrops all the way throughout the story, and believes that they are nothing like flowers. In his imagination he builds them up to be something magical I know this because it says:

“He tried to think what they would look like, but all he could imagine was one flake of falling snow, bitterly frail and white, and nothing like a flower”

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This shows how naïve and young the child is. Also the snowdrops are related to miss Webster who has just lost her boyfriend, and she is strong because she is coping with it and also, she is fragile just like a snowdrop. The ending is quite similar to Seamus Heaney’s poem mid-term break’ by the fact that we find out how the boy reacts, when he actually sees the snowdrops.

  The characters play an important role in both poem and story, the main character in ‘snowdrops’ is the small child, we know that he is very inquisitive and quite ...

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