Mid-Term Break: Critical Essay. Heaney reveals his true feelings to us in the poem and makes it real to us by using various techniques. How Heaney achieves this will be the subject of this essay.

Heaney continues to describe the unfurling events and now turns his focus to how others are coping with the death. First, he contrasts the gloominess of the last two stanzas by starting with the description of a content baby in a pram. He uses onomatopoeia to describe the cooing of the baby. Even though this is a sad scene, the baby is happy and innocent as it has no knowledge of the situation. Heaney also tells us he is embarrassed that old men stand up to hold his hand and tell him that they are sorry for his trouble. He feels awkward because this is a case of role reversal; children are supposed to stand up in respect to old men. Once again this is emphasized with alliteration. Another instance of role reversal is when he holds his mother’s hand. His mother begins to break down and cough out “angry tearless sighs”, while there is no reference to even the slightest gasp from Heaney. This is intensified with the use of assonance (“tearless sighs… ambulance arrived”).Normally children are the ones to break down while the adult is the one who is calm and contained. The roles are reversed. Heaney says that the ambulance arrives “with the corpse” rather that with the person’s name, which suggests that the death has not been accepted by him yet.

In the poem, Heaney now goes back to his own reactions to the event. He says that there are “snowdrops and candles” by the body. Snowdrops represent new beginnings and white is a sign of purity. This could suggest a child is involved. Candles create a calm atmosphere. He also says that these items “soothed the bedside”, rather than they were just beside the bed. This is significant as he and his family are in need of emotional support. Now Heaney uses “him” to describe the dead body and he says that the person is “paler now”, which shows that he has now acknowledged the death and has accepted it. Alliteration is used a lot in this stanza again, which makes the words stick in your head. Heaney describes a bruise on the left temple of the dead person, as a “poppy”. This could mean many things. It could merely represent the shape and colour of the bruise, perhaps the fact the bruise is darker in the middle, but it may be a sign to show that he will not forget this person as poppies are the flowers of remembrance. He emphasizes the youth of this person again by saying “He lay in the four foot box as in his cot”.

The conclusion to the poem is a one line stanza. It reads

“A four foot box, a foot for every year.”

This stands out because it is short and snappy. Because it is in its own stanza, it prints itself into your mind and makes you think about it again and again and again. We now know that the dead person is in fact a four year old child. The alliteration emphasizes the youth of this child.

Now that I have read this poem and studied it in detail, I believe that I understand the pain and grief Heaney suffered. He intelligently used words and phrases with double meanings and he used large amounts of alliteration which made the facts in this poem stand out; that Heaney was deeply traumatised by this experience and it has stayed with him all this time. The alliteration in this poem is repetitive, so even though it is effective at making this whole ordeal seem like an old memory of your own that you are reliving, it does become a bit boring after a few stanzas.