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User Rating: |
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8.9
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(197
votes)
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I sat all morning in the college sick bay
Counting bells knelling classes to a close,
At two o'clock our neighbors 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 the left temple,
He lay in the four foot box as in a cot.
No gaudy scars, the bumper knocked him clear.
A four foot box, a foot for every year.
Seamus Heaney
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Read poems about / on: sorry, baby, school, sick, father, mother, home
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Comments about this poem (Mid-term Break
by
Seamus Heaney
) |
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comments about this poem (Mid-term Break by
Seamus Heaney
)
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Tim Lynch
(6/21/2009 7:22:00 PM) |
I think the poppy bruise has something more to do with Demeter. It was her emblem. She is seen as the goddess of the pure or the giver of a blessed afterlife. Poppies themselves also represent eternal sleep, or are offerings to the dead. In Greco-roman myths, the scarlet poppy signifies the promise of resurrection after death.
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Janette Mcdermott
(4/12/2009 4:58:00 AM) |
Happy 70th, Mr Heaney, you are a true inspiration - may you have many more. Go raibh maith agat.
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Nikki Oneill
(3/21/2009 12:35:00 PM) |
'Poppy bruise'. The poppy is a symbol to all the young lives which were lost in WW1/The Great War. The poet uses the word poppy to indicate how young is brother was and how his life was wasted!
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Campbell Hay Hay
(3/12/2009 5:19:00 PM) |
Debz, its got double meaning.
Its supposed to describe the car hitting his brother AND that that its a big shock.
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Debz Q
(3/10/2009 3:21:00 PM) |
SETTING THE RECORD STRAIGHT
'it was a hard blow' has nothing to do with the accident.
It is a term used quite widely meaning a big shock or something devastating.
The 'poppy bruise' just means a small bruise on his head.
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Aifric Kyne
(2/22/2009 7:54:00 AM) |
i dont think the 'poppy bruise ' has anything to do with being remembered.
i think its just a way heaney describes seeing his brother dead and instead of writing 'the bruise on his head was massive and red and multi coloured' he wrote 'poppy bruise' to soften it make him appear a rest and peaceful. x
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Amy Curran
(1/27/2009 8:57:00 AM) |
I think that this poem is highly interesting. we analised it in english and i loved. i am currently writing an essay on it. :) . It is very sad the last line. telling readers that heaney's younger brother was only 4 years old...
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Native Dreamer
(1/9/2009 5:05:00 PM) |
This poem has set in the minds of so many Irish schoolchildren. I often recited it to my family as a child and its message and rhythm touched my family deeply. It almost requires no effort to memorize and its words are etched in my mind and those of my classmates. Mise le meas.
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Martin O'neill
(12/11/2008 5:01:00 AM) |
This as beautiful as Bob Dowl and Vincent Deprat are philistines.
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