Analysis of Mid-Term Break Poem by Seamus Heaney.
There are stories in the poem and story in the poem “Mid- Term Break” by Seamus Heaney is about a young boy who just come back from boarding school had loss his brother in an accident. The death of the brother had give difference emotional respond by the family member about the death .
Literary device make poem better and make it interesting to read .Furthermore, there are a lot of literary devices that use by Seamus in this poem. He use personification in this poem . Personification is a figure of speech in which human characteristics are attributed to an abstract quality, animal, or inanimate objects (Personification, Encyclopedia Britannica eb.com). For examples that related to the poem is “Counting bells knelling classes to a close”, the bells being attributed to human characteristic which is “knelling”. The word knelling is often associated with death (as with the “knelling” of a funeral bell) so this adds a morbid tone to the opening of the poem (Mid Term Break , Teachnet). He also uses metaphor in this poem. Metaphor is a figure of speech in which an implied comparison is made between two unlike things that actually have something in common (About.com). Examples for the metaphor is “the corpse stanched” and “candles soothed the bedside.”. The candles is use to create the image of sorrow and with the uses of metaphor the writer will create the visual imagery in our mind which is the candles produce a dim light that put the numb situation in that house.
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Short Story Settings » By reading the poem also we can see that Seamus Heaney only use simile once to compare the coffin to a cot, “He lay in the four foot box as in a cot.” Simile is a figure of speech in which two fundamentally unlike things are explicitly compared, usually in a phrase introduced by “like” or