In the second stanza, the main character had got home and finds his father crying. The next few lines describe briefly about how the main character’s relative has died, from:
‘…And Big Jim Evans saying it was a hard blow.’
‘Hard blow’ may mean that a car had knocked him/her out, however, ‘hard blow’ has another meaning that could mean that it had given a ‘big impact’ on Big Jim Evans.
The next stanza of the poem has a contrast in the gloomy and sad mood, and this can bee seen from:
‘The baby cooed and laughed and rocked the pram’
Since the baby is very young, it would not know what had happened. The scene of a cooing and laughing baby is a happy feeling, which is very different from the mood of a sad death. This has an effect on making the atmosphere ironic.
From the past few stanzas, it is not known who the dead person is related to the main character. He has been described as a sibling, and from where it says:
‘Whispers informed strangers I was the eldest,
Away at school, as my mother held my hand’
From this significant information is known that the main character is the elder sibling of the dead person. Furthermore there is also specific information that the main character had been away at school; therefore we know it is a boarding school.
The 5th stanza describes the consequence of the main characters reaction towards the death, as he/she ‘coughed out angry tearless sighs’. And there is also an indication of time when the corpse arrives to his/her house from:
‘At ten o’clock the ambulance arrived
With the corpse, staunched and bandaged by the nurses.’
This gives some information that the dead person had gone to the hospital after the accident.
In the second last stanza, the main character at last sees his dead younger sibling since a long time ago as he was at boarding school. The last line of the stanza indicates that it is ‘For the first time in six weeks’
In the final stanza, it is finally known that the dead sibling is a smaller brother who is four years old. This stanza explains a lot about his appearance:
‘Wearing a poppy bruise on his left temple,
He lay in the four foot box as in his cot.
No gaudy scars, the bumper knocked him clear.
A four foot box, a foot for every year.’
To begin with, his bruise is described as ‘poppy’. Poppies are showy flowers, which the poet probably wanted to illustrate the bruise on the brother’s forehead as being showy. We also know that he is a younger brother because from earlier we knew he was a younger sibling, but it was not known whether he was a brother or a sister. Now it is known that he is a brother from ‘… on his left temple’. The dead person is indicated as ‘his’; therefore we know it is a brother. It is also known that the brother is four years old from ‘… four foot box.’ Lastly, there is clear information that the boy had died from a car accident as it describes ‘…the bumper knocked him clear’.
As a conclusion, ‘Mid Term Break’ is a sad, depressing, gloomy poem except for the contrast in the third stanza. It gives a clear idea that the poem is about accidental death although it does not use the word death. There were many clues in this poem death had occurred from word such as ‘funeral’ and ‘corpse’. Therefore, in many ways Seamus Heaney describes the concept of accidental death in this poem.
