Seamus Heaney's Mid-Term Break

Mid-Term Break (1966) is one of the selected poems in Seamus Heaney’s book, Death of a Naturalist (1966) in which he impacts the readers in a stunning manner through literary devices and vivid imagery. Heaney effectively incorporates his Irish culture into the poem, emphasizing the time and place in which the poem takes place. The focus of this poem is the death of Heaney’s younger brother Christopher, who was killed in a terrible car accident at the young age of four. In the poem, Heaney chooses to focus on the reaction of his parents and the atmosphere around him in order to convey the shocking impact of the death, as well as create order within himself. Although from a child’s perspective, Heaney’s voice is strong and pierces through the poem and it’s lyrical and elegiac tone makes this poem especially powerful and moving, creating a sense of grief and sympathy within the readers.

Heaney’s choice of diction ‘sick bay’ and ‘knelling’ creates an ominous tone in the poem and foreshadows what awaits this young Heaney at his home “neighbors drove me home”. The word ‘knell’ is appropriately used in this context, as

Heaney uses flower imagery – poppy – to describe the terrible bash that killed young Christopher in the car accident. “Wearing a poppy bruise on his left temple,” Heaney creates a vivid image of the bruise, giving the readers an image of its size, color and shape placed on a tiny temple of an innocent four year-old. Once again Heaney drifts from reality as he describes his brother laying in a cot rather than a coffin “He lay in the four foot box as in his cot.” There is a sense of relief within Heaney however, when he mentions that there were “No gaudy scars” and that the “bumper knocked him clear” suggesting that as the bumper hit Christopher in the temple, it allowed him a quick death rather than a painful, lingering