A Phone Call as an Indicator of Mortality in “A Call” Anonymous 12th Grade

If there is one thing that almost every single person in world has in common, it is an existential fear of death. The subconscious thought that eventually reaches a sudden, overwhelming, hyper-realistic tipping point that we have been internally suppressing for so long and remain unprepared for when the moment actually comes. In “A Call”, the author, Seamus Heaney, captures this feeling through a phone call between the speaker and his/her father. After the speaker is put on hold by his mother to get the speaker’s father who is weeding, the speaker is given ample time to imagine the father’s actions. The speaker’s imagination and thoughts digress from his father, to vivid imagery of his parent’s household, ultimately coming to the realization of his own father’s mortality, with the subliminal thought of death gradually intensifying to a conscious realization. Heaney’s phone call metaphor evolves into the speaker’s subsequent and startling realization of his father’s mortality.

In the first two stanzas, Heaney uses the metaphor of a literal phone call and the speaker’s imagination of his father weeding to establish the speaker’s familiarity and appreciation of his father. The poem’s abrupt start with the phrase “hold on” (1) is...