Seamus Heaney’s “Mid-Term Break”
Seamus Heaney’s poem, “Mid-Term Break,” dramatizes the conflict of denial and acceptance, as the speaker, a boy, returns from school for the funeral of his younger brother. The reader witnesses the literal events as the boy waits at school, returns home to the mourning family, and sees the body of his little brother in the coffin. While the events in the poem seem ordinary and there is little question of what happened, Heaney had good reason to tell this story as a poem and not in prose.
A clue to this reason for poetry versus prose comes from literary ...
