The Tragic and Unnaturally Static Nature of Death in Heaney’s ‘Opened Ground’ Jack Duckett 12th Grade

Seamus Heaney’s ‘Mid Term Break’ and ‘In Memoriam Francis Ledwidge’ lament needless violence, as well as the one-dimensional and euphemistic way with which general society deals with the loss of innocent, pure lives, whether it be a personal tragedy, or a swathe of atrocities wreaked on society by war. To do this, Heaney depicts these lives as seeming to belong ‘among the dolorous and lovely’, rather than as a bleak, ‘pallid’ figure or a ‘stanched’, ‘bandaged’ corpse; the mournful and saddening end which gratuitous death has conferred upon them, and exposes the falsity of normalized modern practices which cheapen and reduce both tragedies and sacrifices which end in death.

‘In Memoriam Francis Ledwidge’ begins with the young Heaney gazing up at the ‘bronze soldier hitch[ing] a bronze cape’, the repetition of the word ‘bronze’ may represent the idea that such a concrete, fixed object can never begin to encompass the complexity of the tragedies of war, but also elucidates the shallowness of this memorial, its staunchly respectable and shining monotony later contrasting with the weak, mottled ‘pallid Catholic face’ that ‘ghost[s] the trenches’. The solidity of this metallic bronze man, who acts as an everyman for all fallen...