Examining How Seamus Heaney Presents Childhood Memories in ‘Blackberry Picking’ and ‘Mid Term Break’ Anonymous 12th Grade

Heaney's autobiographical poem 'Mid Term Break' details how a younger Heaney reacted to the death of his four-year-old brother, as well as how he dealt with suddenly being seen as an adult by his peers. Heaney takes on a numb, almost clinical tone when regressing to his fourteen-year-old voice, with every line delivered simplistically and with detail, perhaps alluding to the sense of helplessness that Heaney felt, as well as replicating the only partial understanding he had as a child. The phonology is overall euphonic - which seems odd considering the subject matter - but ultimately creates a dichotomy between Heaney's calmer tone and the chaos of the funeral described in the poem.

The slow, analytical tone to the poem, including the high frequency of temporal markers such as 'all morning', 'two o'clock', and 'six weeks', gives the poem a precision typically unseen from Heaney, who leans more towards ambiguity in his poetry. This precision alludes to the period of processing his brother's death that the teenage Heaney went through, 'counting bells' to presumably distract himself. The soft, euphonic 'l' sounds of the line 'bells knelling classes to a close' invoke imagery of a slow, mournful funeral bell, with the active verb...