Mid-Term Break

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1966

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Summary

Background

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Themes

Grief

Grief is the central emotion at the heart of the poem, as Heaney, writing over a decade later, processes the memory of his younger brother’s death. The overwhelming sense in the poem’s opening three stanzas is that words are inadequate in the face of such tragedy. Although the neighbors are well-meaning in their attempts to comfort the boy and his family, their clichés only emphasize their inability to match the occasion. Likewise, the father and mother are unable to articulate speech, and even the mother holding her son’s hand only partially bridges the emotional gulf. Grief, in other words, is presented as an isolating emotion: a stimulus for realizing the gap in communication that exists between the self and others, marking growth in the speaker’s knowledge of the world. From being a child stuck in the familiar rhythms and routines of school, the young Heaney is thrust into the adult world, and gains an understanding of the tragic fragility of life. Thus, in the poem’s final stanzas, as he regards the body of his younger brother, he sees it with a piercing clarity. The language of the poem becomes the way grief is processed. Yet, Heaney’s poetic style, in which heightened emotion is always avoided in favor of understatement, shows that he still wants to respect his rural Irish community’s reticent mode of expressing grief.

Memory

Heaney has written that memories from his early life have formed the core of his poetic life (Dennis O’Driscoll, “Set the Darkness Echoing”: The Guardian, 2006). Like many of the poems in Heaney’s debut collection Death of a Naturalist, “Mid-Term Break” is concerned with the recollection of childhood memories from the point of view of adulthood. In another poem “Follower,” Heaney recalls his father plowing the fields while he as a young boy, followed behind: “I was a nuisance, tripping, falling, / Yapping always” (Lines 21-22)—dismissively deriding himself as a child in the same way his hardworking father might have in the moment. Similarly, in “Mid-Term Break,” a strong memory of the father appears, with the shocking effect of his crying more apparent to a reader familiar with the stoic, tight-lipped character presented in other poems. Heaney’s memories are remarkable for their clarity and precision. The act of memory is a way of showing respect for his father, relatives, and the traditional community in which he grew up. This is a significant move for a poet writing in the 1960s, when popular culture, especially counterculture, prized throwing off the shackles of tradition. Yet living in Belfast, this was never going to be possible for Heaney, who understood that the violent conflict in contemporary Northern Ireland was rooted in its troubled past. By mining his memories of personal trauma and tragedy with an almost forensic recollection, he was echoing the traumatized condition of Ireland at that time.

Communication

The rural Irish community of Heaney’s childhood was one in which emotions were better left unexpressed, particularly for men, who were expected to show a tough acceptance of life’s hardships. For a young boy with a growing interest in language and words, this was always going to present difficulties, and throughout the first half of “Mid-Term Break,” the absence of words and the resorting to cliché are sources of tension and discomfort. The image of the baby who “cooed and laughed” (Line 7) is memorable for being so out-of-kilter with the general mood of repressed emotion, encapsulated by the mother’s “angry tearless sighs” (Line 13). Words, when they are said, have the potential to hurt even unintentionally. Thus, “Big Jim Evans saying it was a hard blow” (Line 6) with unconscious cruelty echoes the fatal blow of the car. Likewise “sorry for my trouble” (Line 10) as a euphemism for the loss of a brother is so inadequate as to be absurd. Yet, in the language Heaney uses to recall the occasion, he also follows this pattern of emotional repression, with understatement always preferred to heightened emotion. In this way the poem manages to give voice to the repressed style of communication preferred by the community.