Mid-Term Break Commentary

In Seamus Heaney's Mid-Term Break, Heaney uses pauses in his speaking and emotional diction in order to not only create an depressing and/or sad tone, but to demostrate the break down and gender roles and the break down of the speaker himself during such a tragic time.

In the second Stanza, Heaney uses the dashes at the end of the first two lines. This could imply that he begins to feel emotional and may be a little caught up in his words due to the fact that someone close to him just passed away. The expression " choked up" could be used to describe this pause in the speaking. Moreover, the specific words of "my father crying" and " he had always taken funerals in his stride" demontrate the breakdown of gender roles due to the fact that the father was crying, while the mother "coughed out angry tearless sighs". Usually, the mother is typically the more emotional and more sensitive character during a time of tragedy, while the father usually holds the family together, and keeps them strong, with little to no emotion shown. However, in this case, those "typical" roles are broken because the men and the women "roles" switch and the mother becomes the stronger figure.

Another example, which I briefly mentioned, is when the mother "coughed out angry tearless sighs". This shows that the mother was not only angry, but maybe a little disoriented due to the fact that she is sighing, angry, yet not crying. Nevertheless, this and the previous example both create a sad and depressing tone, and cause the breakdown of the speaker because the speaker sees that his parents are grieving, which in turn makes him breakdown because the feelings are too strong. Other emotional diction that he uses includes" crying", "funerals", "hard blow", "sorry for my trouble", "corpse", and "four-foot box", which all illustrate how sad and depressing the situation was for the family and how the breakdown of the family occured.