Summary:
Seamus Heaney's poems "Mid-Term Break" and "Follower" both depict Heaney's use of symbolism to foreshadow the sorrow and mourning of death. "Mid-Term Break" describes the powerful impact of death of a small child upon Heaney, his family, and all humankind; while "Follower" leads us to explore the different rhythms of life and how time affects generations. While these poems are of different emotional caliber, Heaney ultimately questions the idea of his own mortality in both poems, and his expert use of symbolism leaves us haunted, something few poets can achieve.
Describe important symbols in the texts you have studied AND analyse how the symbols helped develop important ideas.
Nobel Prize winner Seamus Heaney is renowned for writing poems about his personal childhood memories with strong influences from his Irish heritage and countryside. One of the ideas Heaney communicates is the journey and rhythms of life and death, particularly by confronting. In 'Mid-Term Break', Heaney's poignant vignette of his younger brother's death and its impact forces him to confront death and mortality. However Heaney uses 'Follower' to contrast the different stages of people's lives. Both poems effectively use symbols to develop these ideas.
Symbolism is used to foreshadow the sorrow and mourning of death. In the first stanza of 'Mid-Term Break', Heaney introduces the poem by waiting in the "college sick bay", a place connoted with disease,.....
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