Seamus Heaney Essay.

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Seamus Heaney Essay

Many of Heaney’s poems are about death, decay or loss of some kind. Choose two or three poems which you think illustrate these themes and discuss them in detail.

        Seamus Heaney was born in 1939 in County Derry in Northern Ireland. He was the eldest of nine children and didn’t follow in his family’s tradition of becoming a farmer. Instead Seamus Heaney decided to become a poet. In many of Seamus Heaney’s poems he writes about death, decay or loss. In these many poems where he does talk about loss Heaney does not always mean it literally like in ‘The Early Purges’ when he loses his own opinions and sentimentality as well as the literal things like the kittens. The poems that I am writing about are all from Seamus Heaney’s first book ‘The Death Of A Naturalist’ published in 1966.

        The first poem that I am going to write about is ‘Mid-term Break’. This poem is about literal loss, the loss of his little brother who was killed in a car accident. Seamus Heaney remembers everything about this day. He wrote this poem when he was in his twenties and his brother died when he was away at boarding school. Seamus Heaney remembers everything about this day he knows the exact times “At two o’clock our neighbours drove me home” he mentions the time again “At ten o’clock the ambulance arrives.” We know that this was such a sad day in Heaney’s life because school bells are normally quite a happy thought, but Heaney compares them to those you would normally hear at a funeral “bells knelling classes to a close.” When he got home from school he saw his father crying. Heaney sees his dad as a very strong man and this upsets him “I met my father crying - he had always taken funerals in his stride.” His baby sibling is completely oblivious to what is happening “The baby cooed and laughed and rocked the pram.” Heaney was embarrassed and felt he had to be strong because his mother and father are both very upset “I met my father crying” and also

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        “As my mother held my hand

          in hers and coughed out angry tearless sighs”

He writes as if he was an outsider in his own home seeing and hearing everything “Whispers informed strangers I was the eldest.” He uses the word “corpse” to distance himself from his dead brother instead of the word body. It is as if he wants to forget about his brother and act as if nothing has happened. Seamus writes about the white snowdrops in his brother’s room to show us how pure and innocent his brother was. He describes his brother as “paler now” ...

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