Mid-Term Break - By Seamus Heaney

Step 1: reading and thinking

• Looking at the poem, my first impression was its depressing story. This is not a poem I'm usually extremely interested in due to the fact that it doesn't give any deeper meanings nor does it make you think or question yourself.

Step 2: Start essay, summarise poem, establish central opposition

• The poem by Seamus Heaney is about a child, who was hit by a car and passed away. He was presumably 4 years old, which know from the line "A four-foot box, a foot for every year." which explains how long he lived. It is written from the perspective of what we think is his brother. We can say it is from his brother's writing due to the fact that he saw his father crying (second stanza), his reason for crying could be that one of his sons died. Also his mother held is hand and people were talking about how the writer is the eldest of the siblings. The writer is describing what he notices around him, such as his father crying, old men standing up to shake my hand, my mother held my hand, and so on. He also describes time with quite some detail, in the fifth stanza, he says "At ten o'clock the ambulance arrived[...]". He gets specific with the times. The central opposition that I will be focussing on is old and young. In this poem, I see a lot of references to age, and lots of contrast between age. An example of the contrasting ages we see are old men and baby in the third stanza.

Step 3: Look closely at opening of the poem, how poem brings theme to life

• The poem is written in tercets continuously, until the last line which stands alone. He starts quite strong but leaves us clueless with the sentence "I sat all morning in the college sick bay counting bells knelling classes to a close.". He has not yet said anything about the death of his younger brother, which interestingly we can't be sure if it is his brother since he describes him as a "corpse". As soon as we get to the second stanza you start to notice the negativity of the poem. "In the porch I met my father crying -" is where the tragedy starts and from here you know something must have happened. With this line, which is quite a powerful statement, since seeing your father cry is rare, Heaney brings the theme alive of death and tragedy, which sounds quite ironic.

Step 4: Look at other sections of the poem, analyse the details

• As I said before, a strong opposition is old men and baby. Other ages that were referred to are his parents, who are obviously on the older side, and we can clearly see a status change between the elder and the younger. Heaney says "[...] informed strangers I was the eldest." Yet in the line after that it takes a quick turn of making him seem responsible and older, he says "[...] My mother held my hand[...]" which directly changes his status from being the eldest to the youngest. The poem can be easily visualised, and because of this we get the feeling we're looking through the perspective of a younger child, which we get from him holding his mother's hand. Because we're looking from a child's perspective. We also know he's a younger person because he describes older men as old, if he were their age it would be different.

Step 5: Look how the poem concludes

• The conclusion is quite interesting. Because it gets into the details of the passed away child. Heaney describes what he sees in a light way although it was not. Such as " Wearing a poppy bruise on his left temple." does not come over so harsh or horrific. Heaney also says he sees no gaudy scars, since the bumper knocked him clear. He seems to leave his emotions or opinion out of the description, which might be because it was hard for him to write about or express. To come back to the age references, in the las line of the poem he says "A four-foot box, a foot for every year." which refers back to the age of the child who passed away and because of this we know it is a young person who died, which adds on how sad it was since he had his whole life in front of him.