Analysis Of Seamus Heaney's Mid-Term Break

I have selected Seamus Heaney's “Mid-term Break” and Dylan Thomas's “Do not go gentle into that good night” for this analysis. Though both of these poems speak about death and morality, they do so in very different ways. The manner of speak differs in these poems as well as their rhythm, meter, and structure. The way each poem is written creates a unique tone and helps to establish the speaker's mood and emotions. While the tone establishes the mood, each poem's rhythm and meter helps to emphasize its tone. Though both poems differ in their delivery, the message of each poem is clear and distinct. The tone exhibited in Heaney's “Mid-term Break” is solemn and slow. None of the stanzas in this poem have any type of rhyme scheme, be it end rhyme
Some symbolism exists when the speaker says, “I sat all morning in the college sick bay / Counting bells knelling classes to a close. / At two o'clock our neighbors drove me home.” (1-3). This stanza can represent the fragility of life, how life ends, and how time goes on. The speaker himself is sick, though the nature of the illness is not revealed and it could be that he is sick with grief. With grief in mind, the use of the word “morning” is a homophone for “mourning” and may indicate the speaker's state of being. The second line of that stanza possesses some alliteration with the soft “c” sound and really emphasizes the imagery of both the end of classes and the end of a life. The passage if time is also present in this first stanza, as well as in several places throughout the rest of the poem. The poem starts at morning but time passes quickly and by the third line it is already two o'clock. This is symbolic of how quickly time goes by and also of how short the life was of the speaker's deceased
The speaker says, that his “In the porch I met my father crying– / He had always taken funerals in his stride–” (4-5). The phrasing here is very interesting because at first we may think that the father is crying, however, as we see by the use of dashes the speaker is, in fact, the one who is crying. The third line of this stanza is of particular note; “And Big Jim Evans saying it was a hard blow” (6). The phrase “hard blow” is a figure of speech and has some weight to it, it not only refers to the emotional turmoil of losing a child but also to the cause of the child's death. This idea can be connected later when the speaker says that the child is “Wearing a poppy bruise on his left temple, / He lay in the four foot box as in his cot. / No gaudy scars, the bumper knocked him clear.” (18-20). This stanza makes it clear that it was indeed a “hard