Mid-Term Break

• Poet


  Seamus Heaney
• Stanza 1


  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.
• Stanza 2

  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.
• Stanza 3

  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
• Stanza 4

  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
• Stanza 5


  In hers and coughed out angry tearless sighs.

  At ten o'clock the ambulance arrived

  With the corpse, stanched and bandaged by the nurses.
• Stanza 6

  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,
• Stanza 7


  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.
• Stanza 8/Final line

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

  The poem is aboutHeaney's brother, who was killed by a car in 1953 when he was only 4 years old, and Heaney only 14.