mid term break
...us thing. The important thing about two ‘o’ clock is that the neighbours are driving him home. We wonder what’s wrong. We think about the evidence of the closing, knelling bells, the sick bay and the neighbours driving him home. At this point I came to a conclusion that something very bad was happening. A funeral! Then begins the second verse. The first line tells us where he is (his porch) and who is there (his father). “I met my father crying”. Heaney’s word choice here is again representative of the atmosphere. Instead of sobbing or weeping he chooses crying because it comes across as something very painful and paints a picture in ones head of the scene. The next line reinforces what is already a fort of atmosphere and emotion telling us more about his father reading “He had always taken funerals in his stride”. The third line “And Big Jim Evans saying it was a hard blow” It made me really feel the last word as a sinking feeling in the stomach. This is a very empathetic verse. Next comes a break, a relief. A kind of contrast like two extremes that helped me realise the extremity of the focused side of sadness, shock and confusion. “The baby cooed and laughed and rocked the pram”. There’s onomatopoeia to “cooed”. It’s almost like ones hearing it. This makes it seem more immediate. The line after begins “When I came in”. If poems were logical like math (which they are not and hopefully never will be) then this should be in the same line as the one before. There is a reason for this of course. The technique is called enjambment (It’s French). It is the continuation of the sense and therefore the grammatical construction beyond the end of a line of verse or the end of a couplet. Used properly as it is here it backs up the mood and leaves one hanging with suspense even if only for a few hundredths of a second. The rest of the line is the start of another enjambment “, and I was embarrassed” which would continue “By old men standing up to shake my hand”. All this makes one think. It puts even more emphasis on the relief of the contrast. Upon further reading I noticed that the enjambment continues until the second line of the last verse but I will come to that later. Getting back to the last point, what significance does the narrator stating he was embarrassed have on the story? Well I think it’s a change of emotion from being sad and nauseous about the situation. It inserts an awkward uncertain atmosphere of confusion. The next line “Whispered informed strangers” is probably one of the most significant contributions to the poem. One can imagine the silence of the house. Nobody is willing to speak up, out of respect and the same awkwardness of the narrator. The emphasis not put on the people but on the whispers and their affect upon the atmosphere. The alienating, isolated, confusing, and frightened atmosphere. “As my mother held my hand/In hers”. As well as being another as enjambment “In hers” shows us that she is comforting herself and he knows this. To be clear I’m not saying that I think this is bad and selfish but that he’s frightened even more because everyone’s feeling scared and he doesn’t feel he has anyone to lean against and gain strength from. His mother “coughed out angry tearless sighs”. This shows her discomfort about her position. It conveys the forced nature of her sighs. “Sighs” is onomatopoeia, which is strange when combined with coughed out. “Angry”. This sways me to thinking that she may be mad at the driver or just the fact of coming to terms with the death of her child. After all this waiting the ambulance comes with the child. The importance here is the exact time stated. “At ten ‘o’ clock the ambulance arrived”. Just as before with the narrator waiting in the sick bay there is emphasis on the dramatic nature of the event. The ambulance was carrying the “corpse” not the expected child with some adjectives as garnish spread sparsely around. Corpse is quite a medical word and gives a feeling of the remoteness of the dead person. “Stanched and bandaged”. Well first of all I’ll deal with “stanched”. It represents the definitive stop, simply as it exists in the poem. The next part is very interesting if you get the hidden agenda, which is surprisingly flower association. Dating back to medieval times. Flowers used to be used to symbolize many things. Such as romance (rose), orchid (beauty) etc. onto snowdrops which are used in this poem as they represent renewal. This is the second piece of relief from contrast in the story. “I saw him/ for the first time in six weeks” is a very good use of enjambment as it is used for shock not suspense. It then reads “Paler now”. Emphasis being set on the now like it’s a big shock. It creates a new atmosphere of reflection and quiet. Next comes a reference to Remembrance Day in the form of “a po...