“And Big Jim Evans saying it was a hard blow”
In the third stanza the baby is mentioned. It says that the baby is cooing. The baby has no clue what is going on and it is behaving normally, it is to young to understand what is going on around it. Also the word “cooed” is in this line describing what the baby is doing. “Cooed” is onomatopoeia; it is a gentle, cute noise that babies make when they can’t talk. Heaney is very embarrassed in this stanza. The reason for this is there are lots of old men walking around the house, to him it felt unnatural, all of these old men coming up to him and his hand.
The fourth stanza talks about the mother. The mother is very angry but in the same time she is upset. She is angry because she is trying to find someone else to blame for the death. It goes on to tell you that the ambulance has arrived at ten o’clock to deliver the “corpse”. Heaney use the term “corpse” here. This term gives you the impression that he is avoiding the subject and that he has disowned the person.
The next stanza has a lot of information in it. It is explaining about the body laid on the bed. The poet describes the room he says
“Snowdrops and candles soothed the beside”
This gives you the impression that the room is peaceful and calm using the words “snowdrops”, “candles” and “soothed”. These words also give you the time of year because snowdrops only grow in January and February. Also in this stanza it is the first time the poet tells you the sex of the person. In the last part of the stanza the poet says,
“For the first time in six weeks. Paler now”
This tells us that he hasn’t seen the person in a long while and “paler now” is just explaining that he is dead, it is a euphemism saying “paler now” is less direct as say, ‘brown bread dead’.
In the seventh stanza, the poet is describing what injuries or just changes he can see and he spots a bruise on the person’s head but he describes it as, “Wearing a poppy bruise on his left temple”. “Wearing a poppy bruise” is a metaphor, he is talking about a red bruise, as poppy’s tend to be red, and on a part of his head, his temple.
The eighth stanza contains information about the dead male. The poet says,
“He lay in the four foot box as in his.”
This is a simile the poet is comparing the coffin, “The four foot box”, with his cot. This line tells us that the male was a young boy, because only children sleep in cots. It also is saying the child was all sweet and innocent.
Near the end of the poem the poet is talking about how the child died. Heaney says in the poem,
“The bumper knocked him clear”
This indicates that the child was knocked over by a vehicle of some kind because bumpers are only located on vehicles.
The last line of Mid-Term Break is,
“A four foot box, a foot for every year”
This is a moving line as Heaney finally tells you that the boy was only four years old. Also this is a use of alliteration.
Now I am going to look into The Early Purges. The title The Early Purges means to get rid of something unwanted early.
The first line of this poem is extremely direct. It makes you think that the poem will be all about killing animals, death.
“Dan Taggart” is the farmer in this poem and he uses colloquial language, “the scraggy wee shits”. This gives the poem feeling towards what is happening throughout the poem it tells you that he doesn’t care about the kittens and that he just wants to get rid of them quick, also this is informal language. The poet uses the words, “snout of the pump”, this is a good image to use as “snout” is a part of an animal and the poem is about animals.
The kittens were making scratching noises as they were trying to get out of the bucket. He says, “soft paws scraping like mad” this is the sound that the kittens are making trying to escape.
Dan Taggart doesn’t care about the kittens at all. Throughout the poem he is just doing it as if he doesn’t care, which he doesn’t, he just tosses them around and throws them on the dunghill.
Heaney has mixed feelings throughout the poem, at first he thinks it is a horrible thing to do to the little innocent kittens, but then he goes on to realise that the kittens are just in the way, they don’t have a place in a farm because they couldn’t afford to keep them.
He says that he forgotten them in time but when Dan Taggart killed other pests like crows, rabbits, rats or just pulling a hens neck to break it, remind him of the cats.
When Heaney grew up he started to think like Dan Taggart, like the kittens are only pests that they couldn’t afford to have so they had to get rid of them.
In the town that they lived in they considered death unnatural so they didn’t approve of what Dan Taggart was doing.
In the end Heaney does think that it is right to kill the animals because the just get in the way. It is good for the farmers and good for the animals. The last line of the poem is,
“ But on well-run farms pests have to be kept down.
One of the huge differences in these two poems is that The Early Purges is very direct and doesn’t avoid the matter at all whereas Mid-Term Break is the totally opposite and just doesn’t go any where near the subject of death it is very indirect. Also Mid-Term Break is very emotional compared to The Early Purges, which doesn’t show any emotion. Both of the poems are written from a child’s point of view. Mid-Term Break isn’t very factual whereas The Early Purges is. Mid-Term Break is very formal, as it doesn’t contain any colloquial language unlike The Early Purges.
The poem I most preferred was Mid-Term Break. My reason for this is I don’t like the sound of small defenceless kittens being drowned but I don’t like the fact that a small kid got knocked over by a car but that was natural in a way, at least Dan Taggart could have at least tried to find a home in the town for the little kittens.
