A Comparison of Midterm Break and The Early Purges Essay example -- Po

A Comparison of Midterm Break and The Early Purges For this assignment we have studied two poems by Seamus Heaney. Both of these poems are linked because they are about Heaney’s early memories of death and how he coped with these difficult situations when he was a young. The subject matter of the poem ‘Midterm Break’ is about his brother’s death. It also tells us about his feelings about this death. Heaney is away at boarding school. Waiting in the college sick bay. Heaney writes ‘At two ‘o’ clock our neighbours drove me home’. Which shows that his parents were unable to come to pick him up as they might have been held up with something. Heaney wanted to express his feelings, to let us know what he felt like having to cope with the death of his little brother. It must have been a particularly difficult situation for him. There is a lot of sadness in the poem from the beginning. Heaney writes of ‘bells knelling classes to a close’. ‘Knelling is a sound of funeral bells, not a school bell. This indicates that Heaney is going to a funeral. The first person he encounters is his farther ‘crying’, this is an unusual sight for him. â€Å"He always took funerals in his stride†. This shows he’s been to other funerals, but he has not been affected in the same way. Heaney also remembers a family friend commenting on the death as a ‘hard blow’. This means harsh/unexpected also it is an unfortunate pun as his brother has also suffered a ‘blow’. Heaney feels uncomfortable when older men stand up to shake his hand. They say to Heaney ‘sorry for my trouble’, the word ‘trouble’ again seems insubstantial. He has to cope with strangers and whispers from the people that don’t know him. He holds his mothers hand but she c... ...rites in the fourth stanza that he was frightened; this contrasts greatly with dans attitude. Heaney ‘sadly hangs around the yard’ for some time afterwards. Heaney forgets this image but it comes back to him when he sees Dan killing other animals. He appears to have come to term with the farmyard slaughter when he grows up. Heaney writes ‘it makes sense’, this suggests the same cold-hearted views as Dan taggart. The last line suggests that Heaney realises now that some animals are pests. He still does not forget the unsettling incident when he was younger. Both poems show how Heaney deals with death. The death of animals as well as his brother affected him. In one poem he is dealing with an accident, a death and also peoples reactions. In this poem he deals with deliberate killing of animals, this is a colder, harder poem and it is also unsentimental.