Mid-Term Break

Mid-Term Break
Seamus Heaney

I sat all morning in the college sick bay
Counting bells knelling classes to a close,
At two o'clock our neighbors drove me home.

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.

The baby cooed and laughed and rocked the pram
When I came in, and I was embarrassed
By old men standing up to shake my hand

And tell me they were 'sorry for my trouble'.
Whispers informed strangers I was the eldest,
Away at school, as my mother held my hand

In hers and coughed out angry tearless sighs.
At ten o'clock the ambulance arrived
With the corpse, stanched and bandaged by the nurses.

Next morning I went up into the room. Snowdrops
And candles soothed the bedside; I saw him
For the first time in six weeks. Paler now,

Wearing a poppy bruise on the left temple,
He lay in the four foot box as in a cot.
No gaudy scars, the bumper knocked him clear.

A four-foot box, a foot for every year.

Commentary
Seamus Heaney is big change from John Donne, Heaney generally uses alot of imagery to illustrate his experiences and his point of views with his poems. Mid-Term Break is a prime example of the way Heaney uses imagery to share his experience to his audience, the structure and the diction of the poem provides contrasting moods and feelings at the time of his Mid-Term Break.
In Mid-Term Break, Heaney is a college student who comes home after the death of his younger brother. words such as bell, knelling, crying,funerals, blow, sorry, angry, tearless sighs,troubles, corpse, and ambulance contribute to a tone of mourning as well as the grave situation. even though these words depict a serious and mourning tone. the diction develops some contrasting words; baby and old men, describing the old and young gathered together, crying and laughed, too very different moods of sadness and happiness.
The structure and the style of the poem makes it seem like a short story. Each of the three lined stanzas provide, different snippets or pieces of the whole ordeal.Each stanza reveals the next part of his experience. The last stanza is one line in comparison to the seven stanzas preceding it. this last line in singled out because it pulls you back to the reality of the situation. "A four-foot Box a foot for every year" it shows us how a innocent child died.