Activity 2.3.3 – “School Break" by Seamus Heaney
This activity is optional - bonus marks may be given to those students who completed this.
In this activity, you are to write a brief summary in one or two sentences of what is happening in the poem Mid Term Break and it’s deeper meaning. Do this for each of the seven stanzas.
When you locate a literary device, include that in your stanza analysis.
Example: “Sorry for my trouble.” The word “trouble” is a Euphemism: a mild or indirect word or expression substituted for one considered to be too harsh or blunt when referring to something unpleasant or embarrassing. The word "trouble" here replaces the usual way of saying "Sorry your brother's dead!"Submission: PDF format. (file size can't be more than 20 MB)
Mid-Term Break
by Seamus Heaney
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, "Mid-Term Break" from Opened Ground: Selected poems 1966-1996. Copyright © 1998 by Seamus Heaney. Used by permission of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, LLC, http://us.macmillan.com/fsg. All rights reserved.