Mid-Term Break

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1966

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Summary

Background

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Form and Meter

Heaney’s poetry is characterized by a preference for regular forms and metrical patterns. “Mid-Term Break” is composed of six unrhymed tercets (three-line stanzas) closing with a single line. Many of the lines employ iambic pentameter, the most traditional of English poetic meters, used by Shakespeare, Milton, and other canonical poets. The classical iambic pattern of ten alternating unstressed and stressed syllables is established in the first line, “I sat all morning in the college sick bay,” though as early as Line 2 Heaney departs from it by placing stress on the first syllable: “Counting” to create a jarring effect. At other points in the poem, such as Lines 6 and 15, Heaney uses longer lines of eleven syllables, mimicking the cruel reality of experience by pushing against the strictness of the form. Line 18 is a syllable shorter, but the full stop creates a pause that is equal to a syllable in weight. This suggests the silent contemplation by the brother’s corpse and the notion of reticence or absence of words at the heart of the poem’s approach to grief. This control over form mirrors the speaker’s attempt to control or make sense of difficult emotions. It also gives the poem a perfectly crafted feel, not unlike the coffin in which the boy is placed.

Rhyme

The poem uses near rhymes (words that almost rhyme, but don’t quite match all of their consonants or vowels) to end many of its lines: for example, “Close” and “home” in stanza one, “pram” and “hand” in stanza three, “sighs” and “arrived” in stanza five. This rhyme scheme is another way to underscore the fact that the poem’s speaker and his family are unable to fully commune as they experience grief. The near rhymes connect words in lines that are not always adjacent, and create an echoing effect that softens the possible too-pat neatness of perfect rhyme. However, the poem ends on a perfect rhyme: “No gaudy scars, the bumper knocked him clear. / A four-foot box, a foot for every year” (Lines 21-22). As Kevin Coyne points out, the deployment of rhyme in the last two lines is all the more devastating because it is the first true rhyme in the poem (“Seamus Heaney, a Study in Tact,” Poetry Society, 2015).

Assonance and Consonance

Heaney frequently employs the pairing of similar sounds for particular effects. In Line 2 the repeated “ell” sound of “bells knelling” echoes the resonance of the bells themselves. “Stanched and bandaged” (Line 15) with its pairing of two hard “a” sounds amidst a cluster of harsh consonants evokes the horrible reality of the brother’s death. Likewise in Line 21 (“gaudy scars”), the pairing of the two longer vowels suggest an expression of emotion (the “aw” of popular speech), immediately followed by the attempt to avoid it in favor of the plain factual language that follows: “the bumper knocked him clear.”

Enjambment

The continuation of a line into the next stanza is used at key moments in the poem to emphasize the wide gap between gestures of communication and their actual effect. On both occasions the word “hand” is followed by a stanza break, suggesting the emotional gap the hands offered to the speaker are attempting to bridge. Here Heaney effectively uses the white space between stanzas to represent the gap in communication, which is a key theme of the poem.