Heaney is presenting a memory and keeps us from knowing who has died, also that it is from the point of view of a boy. Johnson is a more immediate reaction to the death of his son and his own feelings.
Gillian Clark connects the death in the European conflict to the destruction in nature. However it is also a personal memory and the dream at the end shows her feelings. The title of the poem refers to the mouse, which receives a fatal injury during the hay cutting. Clark compares the mouse to the children, “their bones brittle as mouse ribs” and throughout of the poem there are echoes of the conflict, pain and death: “snare drum”, “jets”, “terrible news”, “killed flowers”, “agony”, “summer in Europe, the fields hurt” and so on. The title of the poem is an unlikely title for a poem about war and so the subject matter takes its readers by surprise, forcing them to look more deeply for the message that is being conveyed through the poem.
The poets use different language and structure. Johnson arranges the lines in rhyming pairs, which we call couplets. He writes the poem in the form of an address to the dead child, but he really shows us his own meditations, he gives his religious references. The poems short lyrics have a striking metaphor that the boy is being “lent” for “seven years” and paid back “on the just day”. The last two lines are memorable, a complex idea is packed neatly into two rhyming lines, here Johnson remembering his sin (of loving to much) expresses the hope or wish that from now on, whatever he loves will not love it “too much”.
Clark use of comparing nature to the political conflict. Her choice of words hint at the destruction, the imagery in the dream. Clark uses a lot of assonance and internal rhyme, “summer”, “drum”, “hums”, “end”, “meadow”, “terrible”, “drifting”, “gift”, all these are hints of destructive element.
Heaney use’s narrative style leading us through the day. He uses imagery to set the tone of the poem. The stanza begins with the “morning” in line one, but it is 2 o’ clock in line three, showing the hours have passed in waiting. The second stanza begins with the image of Heaney’s father “crying”. Heaney’s father appears to be a strong man of few words, so having him crying causes a powerful emotion in the reader. The little brother of Seamus Heaney was hit on his head, as it says the ambulance arrived at 10 o’ clock. We learn in the sixth stanza that Heaney hadn’t seen his brother for six weeks, having been “away at school”. The words “paler now” hang at the end of stanza on line18, causing a sad pause before the sentence cointunes and describes how little changed in appearance from when the boy was alive and dead. The big difference is his paler color and his “poppy bruise”.
The final line of the poem stands out of the rest of the poem. Almost every word is special, so that the reader must take in the line’s message and the shock and deep grief that the family must have felt. There is shock for the reader reading it for the first time also, when they discover who had died and that he was only four years old. The little four year old child who suffered a hard hit to the head from a speeding car was well written in the poem.
Looking at all the poems, the one I find the most effective is “Mid Term Break”, by Seamus Heaney. This is effective because it ahs so many ideas of what the poem is suggesting which makes you think what’s happening and what the poem is all about. I thought the poem was very well written. The poem builds up lots of tension towards the final stanza, which makes you wonder what’s going to happen, which makes it highly exciting. The highlight of this poem would probably have to be the way it was written as it builds up tension, and also makes people feel sympathies for the little four year old boy who was killed as he looked like he was sleeping in the coffin as he slept in his cot.
The main similarities in these poems are that they are all about personal death, very meaningful and in depth. They all show how the death happened, like in mid term break the boy was killed by car. They are all sad. The difference between them is that the deaths happened in different way. They also have different size stanzas.
