Mid-term break by Seamus Heaney

        Heaney’s poem, containing 7 stanzas and 1 line, has lines which are comparably the same length. Each stanza has 3 lines and there are breaks between each stanza. The reason Seamus separates his story into different stanzas is because each one is dealing with something perceptibly different, as if moving from one scene to the next in a movie. The final line of the poem is Heaney’s intention to make it stand out by not including it in a stanza, but writing it as a single line. There is no rhyme in this poem but a rhythm of strong beat can be found in the third stanza; “the baby, which cooed and laughed and rocked the pram”. This rhythmic phrase shows a contradiction between 2 ideas; a funeral is supposed to be a depressing theme but the baby seems to be happy and unaware of the things happening around it.

        Audiences reading “Mid-term break” would feel as if they are reading through someone’s memoir. The poet writes his story by using simple vocabulary and short lines. The assonance and alliteration Seamus uses in the second line of the first stanza gives the reader the heartrending mood of the poem: “Counting bells knelling classes to a close” – the word “knelling” emphasize the ringing to funeral bells.

The use of the word “poppy” in the start of the seventh stanza; “wearing a poppy bruise on his left temple” which applies to the bruise being crimson red and concerned with the miraculous occurrence of the poppy bloom over the land where millions of dead soldiers involved in World War I were buried, is a symbol to portray the violent, tragic death of a young, innocent person. Heaney’s choice of words has certainly triggered the readers’ thoughts in this poem.

        Mid-term break is one very good piece of poem which adds a moral to the ones who read it. The poem shows how a person with a mind as strong as Heaney’s father who had never let any tragic incident affect him, could let tears leak down his face when encountering the death of his own child. This is indeed a very poignant event and I feel sorry for Heaney because if it happened with me, I wouldn’t be able to take it myself. I believe that Heaney is trying to convey a very important message to the audience and that is – ‘take care of your loved ones very well while they’re alive so that later on, you won’t regret because you never know when they are going to leave you.’