The second stanza of The Lesson represents the boy as a goldfish, ‘Around their shining prison on its shelf.’ It symbolises a metaphor, about how he preens himself like a goldfish, putting himself on show. He feels safe and secure, able to show himself off without having to hide from the bullies. His father’s death protects him like the glass bowl protects a goldfish. The final line says ‘Pride like a goldfish flashed a sudden fin.’ This demonstrates the pride he feels.
The Lesson is more vociferous in its meaning and disrespectful for the deceased, the boy in the poem expresses his emotions dramatically. On the other hand, Mid-Term Break has a sense of quiet and respectfulness throughout, with phrases such as ‘whispers’ and ‘tearless sighs’ used, to show a reverence for the deceased. The final stanza of the poem is only one line long, and very sudden and dramatic. ‘A four foot box, a foot for every year’. This final line emphasises how tragic the event is as the coffin is so small, showing the youth of the deceased. The line places emphasis on every word to make the line powerful, with alliteration being used to add particular emphasis. It sums up the despair of losing his brother at such a young age, only four years old. This poem shows the reader that Seamus Heaney must have felt very strongly about his brother’s death.
The poem Mid-Term Break starts in the college sick bay, where he has recently been told about his brother’s death. However, the reader does not know at this time that it is his younger brother who has passed away. He relates the bell at the end of classes to the knelling of funeral bells, ‘Counting bells knelling classes to a close’. This reveals the magnitude of the boy’s distress, as he cannot get the visualisation of his brother’s funeral from his head. The first line of the poem says ‘I sat all morning’, and the final line of the stanza says that ‘at two o’clock our neighbours drove me home’. This shows that the boy must have been in the college sick bay for hours quietly contemplating his younger brother’s death. In The Lesson, Edward Lucie-Smith is first told of his father’s death in the headmasters study. The first line of the poem is very blunt, ‘“Your father’s gone”, my bald headmaster said’. This phrase comes across as sudden, indicating how his father was taken from him suddenly, and that the headmaster doesn’t know how to sympathise with him. The word ‘bald’ is used, to imply the boy is intimidated by his headmaster. This is similar to how Seamus Heaney is confronted by ‘old men’ saying their grievances to him. Both boys do not know how to react when they receive attention from people with high authority and respect.
In Mid-Term Break, the whole poem leads up to when the boy goes up to his brother’s room, where he finds it full of ‘snowdrops and candles’. The white flower represents the purity of the young child, which is appropriate seeing as he is only a small child. The penultimate stanza is where Seamus Heaney comes to terms with the death. The stanza describes how the deceased is ‘wearing a poppy bruise on his left temple’, as a play on how poppies are associated with the dead. Also it represents how the poppy, a small red flower, would reflect the blood-filled bruise on his temple. It is in this room that the reader feels the intense despair that the poet is trying to convey. However, whereas in Mid-Term Break it takes the whole poem for the boy to come to terms with his brother’s death, in The Lesson the boy feels the impact of his father’s death most strongly in the first stanza. In the assembly hall he seems to have gotten over the death and concentrates more on what opportunities it could bring.
The boy in Mid-Term Break did not think of himself, solely of his brother. He seems to be in denial about his brother’s death. He has a much higher level of maturity, yet still seems to be very young. In the fifth stanza when the ambulance arrives with his brother, it all seems quite clinical and emotionless, ‘stanched and bandaged by the nurses’ as if the boy doesn’t know how to empathise or understand how to react. However, the boy in The Lesson is narcissistic and egocentric. He seems to be less mature, due to his self-conceited thoughts. It seems that he gives only a small thought for his father, before thinking how it could be used to his advantage. ‘For there and then I knew that grief has uses – that a father dead could bind the bully’s fist a week or two’. This shows a severe lack of understanding, the boy is described as a ‘month past ten’, so would not know the harshness of reality.
The title of Seamus Heaney’s poem is deliberately deceptive because the phrase ‘Mid-Term Break’ suggests a term holiday, which to a child is normally a happy occasion. In reality, the meaning of the title is considerably less cheerful, as later in the poem, we learn that it is a relative of his that has died. Therefore the word ‘break’ in the title refers to a break in the family. The title suits the sombre style of the poem. Edward Lucie-Smith’s ‘The Lesson’ suggests that the boy must realise something throughout the play. This could mean about how he learns of his father’s death, or it could be of how he realises the advantages it could bring him.
Both poems are structured clear and formally, making use of the iambic pentameter, which serve as sound structures for these particular poems. The stanzas are structured evenly. In Mid-Term Break, there are occasional rhymes, but the last two lines, in different stanzas, form a rhyming couplet. This emphasises the shortness of the child’s life. The stanzas are structured in triplets of lines. On the other hand, The Lesson uses hardly any rhyme and is structured more in blank verse, whereas Mid-Term Break has a fluid and smooth flow. Both these poems do not use any special vocabulary – most of the words are used in commonly spoken English.
Seamus Heaney’s and Edward Lucie-Smith’s poems are both about the death of a relative, and both are structured in iambic metre. However, aside from these two similarities, the poems vary greatly. In Mid-Term Break, Seamus Heaney tries to convey his despair over the loss of his brother while he was away at boarding school. Edward Lucie-Smith talks about the pride he felt from the attention he received when news of his father’s death was disclosed to the rest of the school in the assembly-hall.