15/12/2006 - Poetry - 'Mid-Term Break' by Seamus Heaney
Mid-Term break (1966)
I sat all morning in the college sick bay,
Counting bells knelling classes to a close.
At two o'clock our neighbours 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 his left temple,
He lay in the four foot box as in his cot.
No gaudy scars, the bumper knocked him clear.
A four foot box, a foot for every year.
Seamus Heaney (born in rural Northern Island in 1939) published his first volume of poetry in 1966. Death of a Naturalist was an instant success. This may be thanks to the fact that Heaney manages to reach a very high poetic level in a language that seems deceptively simple at first sight. But like all deceptively easy language, his poems involve a lot of work and craftsmanship.
Being the oldest of nine children of a family from simple, rural people, Heaney almost felt guilty about the fact that he was the first one who had the chance to go to university, afraid that his bookishness might drive a wedge between him and his family. This resulted not only in this (deceptively) simple and straightforward language; the content of the poems was also inspired by his family and his rural background. In the famous first poem Digging he draws a comparison between the craftsmanship of his father and grandfather, ploughing the fields, and his own craftsmanship as a writer, with a pen in his hand as his only tool.
Mid-Term break is one of the best-known poems of Death of a Naturalist. It tells us about his younger brother, who was killed when a car hit him. The atmosphere of death is announced by the bells in the first stanza, but the reader is only informed little by little about what has happened. The final blow is left for the last line, which forms a stanza by itself and as such is given extra power. We can feel the embarrassment of the young boy when the old men tell him they are sorry for his trouble. The baby is the embodiment of innocence, unaware of the miseries of life. One of the strongest elements of this poem is the portrayal of his mother, whose subdued grief, bitterness and anger is very well phrased in the lines as my mother held my hand/ In hers and coughed out angry tearless sighs.
Death of a Naturalist was the first volume of Heaney's poetry I bought, and it is still my favourite, even though he has made many great poems afterwards. Heaney, who very deservedly won the Nobel Prize in 1995, has been one of my favourite poets ever since. Faber and Faber has published a beautiful separate edition of Heaney's debut. Of course most poems are also included in several editions of his Collected Poems, also published by Faber and Faber.
KC
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