Mid-Term Break

The poem opens with a line that immediately establishes the speaker as a young college student, but creates a sense of foreboding at odds with the familiar environment of school: “I sat all morning in the college sick bay / counting bells knelling classes to a close” (Lines 1-2). The word “knelling” with its connotations of death is strange and unsettling in the context of a school, though the regular rhythm indicates something of the repetitiveness of college life. Line 3, “At two o’clock our neighbors drove me home,” emphasizes the breaking of this routine, and generates the movement of the poem into its next stanza.

The idea of home as a familiar and comforting setting exists only momentarily, as stanza two opens with the young speaker seeing his father crying in the porch. “He had always taken funerals in his stride,” Heaney tells us (Line 5), highlighting how out of character the father’s tears are. The type of comfort and reassurance the boy might need is lacking: His father cannot saying anything, as the use of dashes at the end of both of these lines suggests, while neighbors add only useless platitudes, like “Big Jim Evans saying it was a hard blow” (Line 6). Big Jim Evans may be trying to provide comfort, but his vagueness only heightens the trepidation that something awful lies behind these adults behaving in unnatural ways.

Stanza three heightens the sense of discomfort and unease. “The baby cooed and laughed” (Line 7) contrasts the obliviousness of the baby with the speaker’s growing awareness: “I came in and I was embarrassed / By old men standing up to shake my hand” (Lines 8-9). Again, the image underlines that the speaker’s home has been turned into a place of strangeness and unfamiliarity. With stiff, formal gestures, men treat the boy like more of a grownup than he really is, telling him “they were sorry for my trouble” (Line 10), but like Big Jim’s banality, these clichés in the mouths of near-strangers only generate unease. The speaker has been thrust, against his will, into an adult world, the subject of speculation and rumor: “Whispers informed strangers I was the eldest / away at school” (Lines 11-12). The speaker is not yet ready to be in this world, but the rude shock of his brother’s death cannot help but yank the speaker into maturity. The poem dramatizes this sudden shift in Lines 12 and 13: At first, we read, “my mother held my hand,” which seemingly emphasizes his ongoing childlike, dependent state, but enjambment transforms the image: “my mother held my hand / In hers and coughed out angry tearless sighs” (Line 13)—his mother isn’t holding his hand as though leading a child, but instead to draw comfort for herself from him through physical contact, conveying the gap in communication.

The speaker then declares, with an almost brutal directness, the central tragedy that has brought the family into this state: “At ten o’clock the ambulance arrived / With the corpse, stanched and bandaged by the nurses” (Lines 14-15). The description of the body carries pathos through its deliberate avoidance of emotion, only hinting at the injuries the boy suffered. The speaker refers to the victim in a removed, clinical way, calling him “the corpse” to avoid accepting that this is his brother.

Only in the following stanza’s “Next morning” (Line 16) does he absorb the fact that the body is the same person whom he last saw six weeks ago. This stanza features frequent caesuras, or stops in the middle of lines, indicating the rapid sequence of impressions the speaker takes in: “Snowdrops / And candles soothed the bedside; I saw him / For the first time in six weeks. Paler now,” (Lines 16-18). The language takes on a calmer tone as the speaker uses objects to process the tragedy, rather than the family and relatives whose attempts at communication failed. Snowdrops and candles are memento mori (Latin for “reminders of death” frequently used as symbols in art), and they create a painterly tableau as the speaker looks at his brother “Wearing a poppy bruise on his left temple” (Line 19). The poppy, the flower associated with remembering the fallen in World War I, here doubles as a metaphor for the boy’s injury. The fact that such an innocuous-looking bruise (aside from which the body bears “No gaudy scars” (Line 21)) could have led to death is a cruel irony that brings the poem towards the pathos of its final image: “He lay in the four foot box as in his cot.” (Lines 20). In keeping with the whole poem, all the emotion comes from the insistence on its avoidance. The length of the box stands in for the height of the boy, showing how young he was. The horror of the accident is summed up in plain words that hammer home the brutal facts of the tragedy: “A four foot box, a foot for every year” (Line 22). The tone underscores the awful reality of a young, vibrant life cut short before it had really begun.