When Seamus Heaney arrives home, he is greeted by his father crying on the porch. A stereotypical male would usually hold back his feelings and Heaney uses parenthesis to show this.
"In the porch i met my father crying
---He had always taken funerals in his stride---
And Big Jim Evans saying it was a hard blow."
Obviously something had caused him great pain, and parenthesis is effective in showing that normally Heaneys father would bottle up his feelings, and be strong for everyone else, taking things in his stride.
Meanwhile in the next verse.
"The baby cooed and laughed and rocked the pram"
This extract shows that the baby is oblivious to its surroundings and to what is happening. Heaney uses the baby to represent new life and how life goes on no matter what happens.
Heaney uses enjambement to effectively link the stanzas, making them flow continuously, and they almost always have a deeper meaning. For example, in a couple of the stanzas, he uses the word 'hand' to link the verses together. This is a very obvious way of using enjambement but it works really well.
As Seamus Heaney walks into the room, he talks about how he was embarrassed to see old men standing up and shaking his hand to show their respect. He is then met by his mother who is in such a state of shock and disbelief that she is coughing out angry and tearless sighs, meaning that she cannot come to terms with what has happened. We now start to realise that something has happened which would make a mother and father break down, and suggests that it is a brother or sister of the poets.
Later on in the poem, we find out that it was actually the brother who was killed. The fact that Heaney had been away at boarding school and had not seen the boy for six weeks, makes you feel sympathetic and you can almost feel Heaneys' pain by this point.
When he goes in...
"Snowdrops and candles soothed the bedside"
The snowdrops simply represent the innocence of the boy, and maybe even hint at the time of year that this had happened. The candles are to light the souls journey to heaven, and possibly also as a sign of hope for the family. Since the family are Catholic, they leave the body for friends and relatives to see and say their last goodbyes, and the candles would bring a sense of calm into the room, with their incandescent glow.
When Heaney comes to terms with his brothers' death, he visits him in his room, where he is lying in a coffin box. Heaney describes it as like a cot.
"Wearing a poppy bruise on his left temple,
He lay in the four foot box as in a cot..."
But he is not just thinking of it as a cot, he is thinking - and almost wishing - that his little brother would wake up. By this point in the poem, Heaney has not mentioned his own feelings of upset, but indirectly describes his feelings to us if we look at the title and the last line of the poem. It is pretty apparent that he thinks his brothers' life has ended too early in his life, and that is where we notice the title "Mid-Term Break" comes from.
The boy was only four years old, and was killed in a road traffic accident...
"A four foot box, a foot for every year."
The poet is emphasizing the fact that his brother was just an innocent child, and did not deserve to die at such an early stage in his life. He places this line separate from the rest of the stanzas and this draws your attention to it; making you think about how precious life is, and just when you think that you have it all figured out, something happens that makes you question the purpose of life again. We think that the natural order is for adults to die before children and that is why it is such a hard thing to come to terms with when a child dies in a family.
A point i think that Heaney was trying to stress to the reader, is that no matter what tragedies happen in life, in the end we just have to move on and accept the past so we can move onto the future.
Kirsty Allan
