Another poem about loss, “Mid-Term Break”, confronts the death of Seamus Heaney’s younger brother, probably from an accident. Like the previous two poems, Mid-Term Break concerns the loss of a close family member. The overall view of death in this poem is quite a dramatic one, with the description of contrasting emotions of different people. At the beginning it is unemotional. Then the poet describes the emotions and behaviour of others (father, family, friends, the baby, and mother). Finally, the next morning, he goes into his brother’s room to see his body. There is a sense of peace in the room, “Snowdrops And candles soothed the bedside,” and he sees his brother looking pale and lying in his small coffin. At the end of the poem, Heaney appears to accept that his brother is dead and there is an air of calm.
In contrast to the other three poems discussed previously, the poem, “Cold Knap Lake” describes the near loss of a stranger who would have drowned to death if it was not for Gillian Clarke’s mother doing resuscitation on an unknown child. Gillian Clarke remembers her mother giving the girl the kiss of life which ultimately saved her. “my mother gave a stranger’s child her breath.” In her memory of the incident, Clarke’s “father took her (the child) home to a poor house and watched her thrashed for almost drowning.” The last part of the poem describes memories and the loss of memory. The poet relates the near-death of a stranger to the loss of memory over time.
Looking in more detail at “On my first Sonne,” Ben Jonson writes as if he is speaking directly to his son. As a Christian, Jonson uses many religious images such as “child of my right hand.” This refers to Jesus who sat at God’s right hand. Although the poet is obviously very sad about the death of his young son, he says, “For why Will man lament the state he should envie? To have so soone scap’d worlds, and fleshes rage, And, if no other miserie, yet age?” In other words, why are we so sad when his son has escaped the miseries and difficulties of life and of old age? Jonson calls his son “his best piece of poetrie” and he says that “what he loves may never like too much.” He has learned a lesson from his sad loss. “On my first Sonne” is a twelve line poem with six rhyming couplets. Although it is the shortest poem of the four, it is a powerful poem full of love and emotion.
A closer look at the poem “My Last Duchess” shows that it is also written as a monologue, but the speaker in the poem is not the poet but The Duke. The Duke is probably an imaginary character as are the other characters in the poem: The Duchess, the painter and the visitor. The main device in the poem is ambiguity. The reader does not know for sure how the Duchess died although one assumes she did. In a similar way, the reader does not know what the painter said to the Duchess. “Sir, ‘twas not Her husband’s presence only, called that spot Of joy into the Duchess’ cheek.” When the Duke tells us that the Duchess “liked whate’er She looked on, and her looks went everywhere,” we have to try to guess what he means.
The poem begins with the Duke showing his visitor the painting of his late wife. At the end of the poem, the Duke shows his visitor another piece of art, a large statue “Which Claus of Innsbruck cast in bronze for me.” In between, there is a terrifying story of power, death and honour which the reader does not fully understand.
“My Last Duchess” is the longest poem of the four which I am comparing. It contains fifty-six lines composed of 28 rhyming couplets. Although it is a poem about loss, it lacks the strong feelings and emotions of loss associated with the other three poems.
In “Mid-Term Break,” the poet tells the story of arriving home from boarding school in the middle of a family tragedy, the death of his four-year-old brother. Through the reactions and behaviour of others, Heaney creates a picture in the reader’s mind of the atmosphere in his home.
His father, who “had always taken funerals in his in stride,” is crying on the porch when Heaney approaches the house. Next he meets “Big Jim Evans, saying it was a hard blow.” The words “hard blow” have two meanings in the poem: a terrible shock and an injury to the head.
The third stanza describes the poet’s embarrassment at the baby’s laughter which is inappropriate in this serious situation and also “By old men standing up to shake my hand and tell me they were “sorry for my trouble”.” The word “trouble” is an understatement of the family’s great loss.
Next Heaney hears strangers whispering to each other that he is the eldest child who goes to boarding school. In the same stanza, Heaney’s “mother held my hand in hers and coughed out angry tearless sighs.” This shows how devastated his mother is at the loss of her child and it is the only time that the poet himself is treated as a child. Finally, the ambulance arrives “with the corpse,” a very unemotional statement.
The following two stanzas and the final line of the poem show Heaney coming to terms with the reality of his brother’s death. He uses the words “him” and “his” instead of “the corpse.” Aside from the fact that his brother is “Paler now, wearing a poppy bruise (a metaphor) on his left temple,” he appears to be asleep. In the simple but powerful rhyming couplet at the end of the poem, Heaney tells us, “No gaudy scars, the bumper knocked him clear. A four foot box, a foot for every year.”
The structure of this 22-line poem is three-line, unrhyming stanzas ending with an extra line which creates a rhyming couplet. The poem is told by the poet in normal spoken English. Although the poem is not as openly emotional as “On my first Sonne,” there is a strong feeling of sadness and devastation at the death of a much-loved four-year-old child.
“Cold Knap Lake,” the fourth poem involving loss, differs from the other three poems because there is no actual loss of life and the nearly-drowned girl is not a family member but a stranger. In the first three stanzas, Clarke paints a simple, but very moving picture of a nearly-drowned child being saved by the poet’s mother who has the knowledge to give the child mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. In line four, the child “lay for dead.” But, by lines eleven and twelve, “The child breathed, bleating and rosy in my mother’s hands.” Just as “The crowd stood silent, drawn by the dread of it,” the poet and the reader also seem to observe the scene silently. When Clarke’s father returns the child to her home, he watches as she is physically punished for “almost drowning.” This is shocking for the reader.
The next stanza starts with the question “Was I there?” The poet begins to question her memory of the events she has just described and then she wonders about memory in general. “Or is that troubled surface something else shadowy under the dipped fingers of willows.” Clarke compares memory and the loss of memory to Cold Knap Lake after the surface of the lake is disturbed by “the treading, heavy webs of swans.” In the final two lines, a rhyming couplet, the poet concludes that, “All lost things lie under closing water in that lake with the poor man’s daughter.” Like the loss of memory over time, the near-death of the girl in the lake remains slightly mysterious.
The structure of “Cold Knap Lake” is a pattern of a four-line stanza followed by a six-line stanza which is repeated once. Again, like the poem “Mid-Term Break,” this poem is a 22-line poem ending with a powerful rhyming couplet. Clarke tells the story in her own words, but the language changes in stanza four to become quite descriptive and less straight-forward. Although the child survives her accident, the poem “Cold Knap Lake” ends with a strong sense of loss.
In conclusion, all of the poems I compared deal with the theme of loss, although each poet approaches the subject in a different way. In the poem “On my first Sonne,” Jonson opens the poem on a very emotional note. This is the only poem that actually uses the word love: “lov’d boy.” The poet expresses his strong Christian faith and his distress at his son’s death is very apparent to the reader.
In contrast to the emotions expressed in Jonson’s poem, the poem “My Last Duchess” displays a lack of emotive language. The reader does not know what Browning’s attitudes or feelings toward the Duke, the Duchess, or their situation actually were.