Poem Analysis: Mid-term Break
Seamus Heaney himself is the narrator in the poem, Mid-term Break, a sad story from his childhood. It depicts the reactions of everyone around him and of himself to a death in the family. It does this through the poem’s three parts: the waiting at school, the behaviour of everyone at home, and his solitary viewing of the body. This poem is unsentimental but full of emotions.
The first stanza introduces Seamus sitting alone at school, in the “sick bay”. He is waiting, and time passes slowly as he counts “bells knelling classes to a close”. This tells the reader that the mid-term break is not a school holiday, as classes are still taking place. The boy is eventually picked up by his neighbours, which shows the reader that his parents are too busy to pick up their son, so it must be an important occasion. The next stanza starts with Seamus arriving home, and in the porch meeting his father, who is crying. This stanza tells us that we are witnessing a funeral. The reader still does not know who has died, but we know that it is a family member, perhaps a sibling or even the boy’s mother. In the third stanza, the baby “cooed and laughed”; this shows the baby’s innocence and lack of awareness of what is happening. At this point the only emotion that the narrator expresses is embarrassment by the way older men are treating him; like an adult. The fourth stanza describes the way the guests at the funeral react to the boy. He is conscious of the way he is being observed and talked about; this reinforces the idea of the boy having to grow up for this event. The last line in the stanza introduces the boy’s mother; so another family member is eliminated from the mystery of who has died. The next stanza begins with his mother expressing her emotion: “angry tearless sighs”, a contrast to both the boy’s stated emotion and his father’s reaction. In this stanza, the ambulance arrives, and the “corpse” is taken into the house. The sixth and seventh stanzas depict the next morning and the boy visiting the room where the body is laid. Everything he observes is understated, and we find out that the funeral was that of someone who had been hit by a car and killed. In the last stanza we learn that it was a young child who has died, and come to realise that it was in fact Heaney’s brother. This makes the stanza brutal, hard, shocking and unforgettable, as a child has lost his life before it has truly begun. The words are nearly all emphasised, so the reader must take in the line’s message and the shock and deep grief that the family must have felt. The shock for the reader is that as we find out who died, we also find out that the boy was a mere four years old.
