How Seamus Heaney Evokes the Sensations and Emotions of Childhood by Comparing any Three of his Poems.

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28 September 2003

How Seamus Heaney Evokes the Sensations and Emotions of Childhood by Comparing any Three of his Poems

I am going to compare “Churning Day”, “An Advancement of Learning” and Mid-Term Break”. The topics I am going to cover are Heaney’s use of senses, the changes of mood, how he conveys emotions, his subject matters and the structure of his poems.

First I am going to look at Heaney’s use of the senses, which he does with great effect making you feel as if you are in the poem.

In “Churning Day”, Heaney uses a lot of onomatopoeia, even the title is onomatopoeia, ‘Churning’. ‘Plumping’ (Line 7) is also using onomatopoeia to give you a sort of snug feeling. ‘The plash and gurgle’ (Line 33) and ‘pat and slap’ (Line 34) is Heaney’s other use of onomatopoeia in “Churning Day”. These make you imagine more than the other two in my opinion that you are actually there while the churning is going on. It is obviously a very noisy business and I think Heaney conveys that fact to us well. In contrast, “Mid-Term Break” contains only one usage of onomatopoeia, ‘the baby cooed and laughed’, and this is to convey the baby’s ignorance, the onomatopoeia makes it seem more immediate. It is a very emotional poem with a sombre mood, so there is unlikely to be much sound apart from the occasional cry. The baby is a slight relief in the sadness of the rest of the poem. In “An Advancement of Learning”, Heaney uses onomatopoeia to describe the rat in much deeper detail. ‘Something slobbered’, Heaney’s first encounter with the rat is by sound. ‘Slobbered’ shows that the rat is wet (to slobber is to be wet with saliva), it also shows that it is something which Heaney doesn’t like, it is not a flattering word at all. Heaney’s other use of onomatopoeia is to show us how he developed his fear of rats ‘scraped…on ceiling boards above my bed’. Thinking of a rat scraping his claws on the ceiling boards above us when we are trying to sleep makes our skin crawl, it really helps us understand how hard this is for him. Heaney uses onomatopoeia most in “Churning Day” because it is a very noisy process, almost never in “Mid-Term Break” because it is a sombre poem where the atmosphere is too sad for noise, and a little bit in “An Advancement of Learning” to deepen our understanding his fear of rats. Whenever Heaney wants to make sounds clearer to us he uses onomatopoeia.

Heaney uses texture and touch as well to convey to us in greater detail how it would feel if we were there and touched things. In “Churning Day”, Heaney starts by describing how the crust was ‘coarse-grained’ (Line 1) making us realise how rough it was, this reflects the mood of the poem in general, how hard “Churning Day” was. Heaney describes how the kitchen floor was ‘flagged’ (Line 9) to describe how flat the floor was. We then get into the real action of the poem, ‘Arms ached. Hands blistered.’(Lines 15-16) This describes how it felt to do all this churning, it was not an easy thing to do. ‘Corrugated butter-spades’ (Line 21), describes how these butter-spades were wrinkled. ‘Printed slabs’ (Line 30) is Heaney’s last use of touch in “Churning Day”, to describe how they had been finished totally now and felt professional. In contrast, in “Mid-Term Break”, there is hardly any use of the sense of touch apart from ‘stanched and bandaged’ (Line 15) to describe how the corpse looked and felt. Heaney again is much more interested in the deeper emotions than materialistic things in this poem. In “An Advancement of Learning”, Heaney uses a lot of texture to describe how it would feel to touch the rat. ‘Dirty-keeled swans’ (Line 8) describes how the river was dirty again. This is all an introduction to show that there is no surprise, as this is a dirty place, that rats are living here. ‘Slimed’ (Line 11) describes how the rat felt slimy and dirty (or how he imagined it would feel if he touched it). This is a use of sibilants (‘s’ sounds to make the poem feel uneasy). ‘In cold sweat’ (Line 13) describes how nervous and scared he was, at this point in the poem it does not look as if he will face the rat at all. ‘Knobbed skull’ (Line 23) describes the texture of the rats skull (bony), again this is not a flattering word. ‘Tapered tail’ (Line 25) is Heaney’s final use of texture to describe how the tail was not flat. Heaney uses a lot of texture in “An Advancement of Learning” (much more than in “Churning Day” or “Mid-Term Break”) to describe the rat in great detail. “Mid-Term Break” is much too emotional a poem for sensual use. And “Churning Day has quite a bit of texture in it because Heaney wants the reader to realise how the experience felt (which is not easy to do).

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Heaney uses a bit of the sense of smell in “Churning Day” but not in the other poems because there is no need for it. ‘The house would stink acrid as a sulphur mine’ (Line 27) describes the aftermath of “Churning Day”, how it would stink. Heaney’s other use of the sense of smell is ‘sour-breathed milk’ (Line 33) as one of his main memories of “Churning Day” when the day had finished.

Heaney uses the sense of sight in all three poems quite a lot to create an image in our minds of how these things looked. ...

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