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Seamus Heaney

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Seamus Heaney
Seamus Justin Heaney was born in Castledawson, County Londonderry, Northern Ireland in 1939 and died in Dublin, the Republic of Ireland in 2013 at the age of 74.
Seamus was born into a typical Irish farming family, and later had nine younger siblings to look after. His father, Patrick Heaney came from a farming family as well, and his mother Margaret Heaney came from
At the age of 12, Seamus received a scholarship to attend the boarding school of St. Columb’s in Derry and after school he studied English at the Queens University, Belfast and graduated in 1961.
He worked as a schoolteacher before becoming a collage lecturer in Oxford University and then eventually a freelance scribe in the early 70’s.
In 1965, he married a fellow writer Marie Devlin and they had three children, and from 1976 onwards they lived together in Sandymount, Dublin.

A lot of Seamus’s poems “tend to revolve around several common themes” and “are all interconnected”. His memories of his childhood and death are two major themes, which make an appearance in many of the poems he has written. Due to where, and in that certain time period, he grew up in, a lot of Seamus’s poems also focus on nature, farming, his homeland, war, family and religion.
There are many critics that suggest, Heaney’s poems on the Northern Irish troubles which he liked to write about had an “overcautious approach, aesthetically and politically, and [gravitated] instinctively towards Parnassian inoffensiveness” (Parnassian: of or relating to poetry).
Reviews also criticise the fact that Heaney was a “peddler of nostalgia” and he only owed his success to the sponsorship of ‘Faber and Faber’ (a book publisher). However more commonly it was known that he was “a poet rated highly by critics and academics yet popular with 'the common reader.” He also won 17 major prizes including a Nobel Prize in Literature in 1995.

Many people praised Heaney’s works based on how it was “always grounded in actual [and] local detail” and that he wonderfully managed to balance a sense of natural speech with his poetry to create what he described as “a musically satisfying order of sounds”. After his death the ex-president of the USA Bill Clinton said that Heaney’s “mind, heart, and his uniquely Irish gift for language made him our finest poet of the rhythms of ordinary lives and a powerful voice for peace”

Mid-Term Break Mid-Term Break was a poem written by Heaney when he was just 15 years old. It is about the death of one of his younger brothers, Christopher, who was hit by a car and died on the spot at the age of only 4. Heaney came back from boarding school to be with his family at the time, and a year later he wrote the poem Mid-Term Break to deal with his feelings about his brothers death. The main theme present in this poem is death, a very common theme used by Heaney, especially in his collection of poems “Death of a Naturalist”, which contains Mid-Term Break as well. This theme is greatly shown through the use of emotions in the poem, however not by Heaney himself, but by the emotions he draws out of the reader. For example, he uses the phrase “Bells knelling classes to a close” (line 2), which is reminiscent of funeral bells, which obviously evoke sadness in the reader. Themes of family and love are also present in the poem, as Heaney tries to handle his father and mothers emotions as well as his own, and being the oldest has to support his younger siblings as well, all the while feeling the loss for his very much loved little brother. The style of the poem is very simple and straightforward, Heaney states the facts as they are and tells us what he experienced. However there are a lot of double meanings in the poem, from the outside it seems as if he has no big emotional response to his brothers death. There are no exclamation marks, question marks or author-written emotions to give one the impression that he was sad or at all affected. However Heaney can write “a poem with seemingly very few emotions because he knows how to write with emotion”. Through the use of language and undertones, he evokes the emotions in the reader, allowing them to feel how he felt without needing to explain it. Finally the poem is also very structured and organized, with three lines in each stanza and a capital letter at the beginning of each line. This perfectly structured poem is a mask for, and allows us to see, the chaos inside his family, his mind and his emotions. Bibliography "EasyBib: The Free Automatic Bibliography Composer." EasyBib. Imagine Easy, n.d. Web. 25 Sept. 2015. "Life." RTÉ.ie. RTÉ, n.d. Web. 27 Sept. 2015.

"Seamus Heaney." The Poetry Archive. Poetry Archive, n.d. Web. 26 Sept. 2015.

"Seamus Heaney." Poetry Foundation. Poetry Foundation, n.d. Web. 27 Sept. 2015.

"Seamus Heaney." Seamus Heaney. Weebly.com, n.d. Web. 27 Sept. 2015.

"Seamus Heaney." Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation, 25 Sept. 2015. Web. 27 Sept. 2015.

Wheatley, David. "Seamus Heaney, New Selected Poems 1966–1987 and New Selected Poems, 1988–2013 – Review." The Guardian. Guardian News and Media, 12 Dec. 2014. Web. 26 Sept. 2015.

Mid-Term Break
I sat all morning in the college sick bay
Counting bells knelling classes to a close.
At two o'clock our neighbours drove me home.

In the porch I met my father crying—
He had always taken funerals in his stride—
And Big Jim Evans saying it was a hard blow.

The baby cooed and laughed and rocked the pram
When I came in, and I was embarrassed
By old men standing up to shake my hand

And tell me they were 'sorry for my trouble'.
Whispers informed strangers I was the eldest,
Away at school, as my mother held my hand

In hers and coughed out angry tearless sighs.
At ten o'clock the ambulance arrived
With the corpse, stanched and bandaged by the nurses.

Next morning I went up into the room. Snowdrops
And candles soothed the bedside; I saw him
For the first time in six weeks. Paler now,

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.

A four-foot box, a foot for every year.

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