Seamus Heaney

In Seamus Heaney’s “The Forge” we are taken into the speaker’s thought process as he is picturing the inside of a forge that he passes by. He begins by describing what is physically visible to him and slowly uses this information to develop an idea of what goes inside the forge. The speaker uses this imagination of the forge to demonstrate the creative process of poetry. The speaker uses the darkness and mystery of the forge to illustrate the start of the creation process. He begins with his describing what he is able to see of the forge which is just a “door into the dark” , meaning he cannot really see what is going on within the forge. The lack of being able to see can be seen as an illustration of the way you start when writing poetry which is with no ideas what so ever. The fact that he can only see complete darkness is like how he only sees complete darkness in his mind. However, he then begins to describe the outside of the forge which are common forging tools like the “old axles and iron hoops” which start to give him ideas of what is inside. This can be seen as the inspiration that can come to a writer at the beginning of his writing since right after he begins to hear “short-pitched ring”  which is a sound that seems like it’s signifying the start of something which in this case is the forging process but can also be seen as the start of the poetry process. The speaker then describes the “unpredictable fantail sparks” which can be seen as the first brain sparks or first ideas that are coming to his brain since ideas are often unpredictable because they can come at any time and from anywhere. The speaker also uses the semi-color and commas between these observations to show the flow of ideas from one idea to another like the inspiration that happens within writing. These ideas then begin to develop into the next poetic process. The speaker then continues to imagine the process of forging which reflects the development of ideas within poetry. He starts by picturing the “anvil” which is a tool for forging but based on the writing we can say that he is using is to symbolize a tool in writing. He then infers that it “must be somewhere in the centre” which signifies that it is the core of something meaning it is important in some way or another. This thought process can most likely reference a very important tool in writing which is needed in order to begin the whole writing process. This tool can be the imagination of the writer since he continues to describe it as “horned as a unicorn” and a unicorn is a fictional animal that can only exist within our imagination.

This illustrates the importance of imagination within the writing process and how it must be the most important tool in writing since it is at the center of it. He then describes this tool as “immoveable” which again shows the importance of the tool since it cannot be moved and it is there like “an altar” showing again how high up in importance this tool is since someone in an altar is often someone of importance. The speaker continues to describe how the forger “expends himself”  which can be a representation of how a writer expends himself within the crafting of writing. This is further supported with the reference to “shape and music”  which in other words is the creation of objects and sounds within the forge. He uses these words instead of sounds and objects in order to exemplify the beauty of the creation process within both the forgery and poetry giving both a very artistic description. He begins to further expand on his feelings and opinions within writing as the poem continues. Furthermore, in the last stanzas the speaker describes the actions of the forger in order to illustrate the hard work that begins to happen when finally starting to create the poem. He begins to signify the start of his writing when he “recalls a clatter” which means he has finally remembered something or something has finally came to his mind. This is the ideas finally hitting him to start his writing. He then describes “grunts” which is a sound that many make when frustrated which is a reference to the frustration within the crafting of poetry.

He further says that something “goes in” signifying the start of something because something has finally gone through which in this case is the start of the craft that has finally begun. Then he begins to describes the “slam and flick” within the forge which are sounds that are louder than the sound the speaker described at the beginning of the poem. This progress from weaker sounds to louder ones is a representation of how within the writing the crafter starts from small thoughts and moves onto huge ones from those small ones. He then describes the beating of “real iron” which in forging happens when they are making something and in this case is the creation or crafting of the poem. The speaker ends with “to work the bellows” which is as shout and can be seen as something very chaotic and when talking about poetry it can be a reference to the chaotic nature of it since you create something orderly out of a bunch of chaotic ideas. Seamus Healey’s speaker ends up showing the hard and lengthy process that comes with writing poetry. He uses his thought process when imagining the inside of the forge to illustrate the process of the creative process. He treats what is inside the forge like the inside of his mind when he is working on poetry. He compares both the forge and the creating process as a place where work of art happens and where beauty arises from hard work. The speaker gives the reader a mental picture of what it feels like to go through the creation process and how one must go about it. It is not just some easy and quick process like most people believe it is. The process is a series of steps and it can be very chaotic and frustration like that of forging.

Seamus Heaney ‘Mid-Term Break’ The main theme of ‘Mid-Term Break’ is the tragedy of the death of a young child, whose life ‘break[s]’ when he is only four years old; this tragedy also ‘break[s]’ the lives of others, specifically the child’s parents and brother. The tone of the poem is very sombre, as it explores the manifold ways in which lives are broken and shattered by death. In literal terms, the title refers to the ‘Mid-term Break’ of a school vacation; in this sense it is highly ironic, as the holiday the poem’s narrator gets from school after ‘six weeks’ of classes is not for a vacation, but for a funeral.

However, as indicated in reference to the theme, ‘break’ has other meanings relating to the broken life of the dead child and to the broken life of those close to him. Additionally, ‘Mid-Term’ can be read not just as referring to a school holiday, but to a term of life; thus the child’s life has been broken prematurely, in ‘mid-term. ’ So while on a literal level the title refers to a school vacation, on a metaphoric level it refers to a life which has been broken before its natural p.

Though the poem is set out in even three-lined verses, except for the anomalous last line, it is actually structured around three geographic locales, locales which are also distinguished from each other in temporal terms: the ‘college,’ location of the first verse, in which the narrator remains ‘all morning’ until ‘two o’clock,’ the narrator’s house, mainly the front porch and front room, where the narrator remains until ‘ten o’clock’ at night when the body is brought home and, finally, the upstairs room where the corpse is laid out, which the narrator visits the ‘Next morning. The movement is one from the exterior world of school and non-familial acquaintances, to the interior world of the house, friends and family, and finally to the upstairs room where the narrator stands alone with the body of his brother. This movement can reflect the way in which death isolates us and sets us apart: as the narrator is increasingly isolated, finally left alone with the corpse, so death separates us from normal human interactions and leaves us alone to confront our mortality. This sense of increasing alienation from the world of normative human existence is marked throughout the poem.

The first people the narrator refers to, in the first verse of the poem, are the ‘neighbours’ who drove him home; however, once at home, he is disconcerted to find his ‘father crying,’ an action which the narrator regards as disturbingly abnormal for a man who ‘had always taken funerals in his stride. ’ The baby’s actions in ‘coo[ing] and laugh[ing] and rock[ing] the pram’ also disturb the narrator, as he clearly finds them incongruous; he is further ‘embarrassed/By old men standing up to shake [his] hand//And tell [him] they were ‘sorry for [his] trouble. ’ Alienation is increased as the narrator now uses personification to create a sense of disembodiment: ‘Whispers informed strangers I was the eldest;’ he is further distressed by his mother’s reaction, as she ‘coughed out angry tearless sighs. ’ Here, the unusual collocation of ‘coughed’ and ‘sighs’ works to create a sense of disturbance and discord: it is almost as if the mother’s actions make no logical sense.

Finally, the narrator feels alienated even from his young brother: it is not his brother who is brought home at night but a ‘corpse, stanched and bandaged by the nurses. ’ Thus the narrator feels increasingly set apart from the world around him, even distanced from the body of his brother, profoundly alienated and intensely self-conscious of his own alienation. This self-consciousness, finally, is emphasised by the extensive use of the subject pronoun ‘I,’ the object pronoun ‘me’ and the possessive determiner ‘my’ in the first six verses of the poem.

The narrator declares ‘I sat all morning;’ ‘our neighbours drove me;’ ‘I met my father;’ ‘I came in, and I was embarrassed;’ ‘to shake my hand;’ ‘tell me they were ‘sorry for my trouble;’’ ‘I was the eldest;’ ‘my mother held my hand;’ ‘I went up into the room’ This extensive self-reference is only abandoned in the last few lines of the poem, when the narrator finally looks at the body of his brother, ‘him,’ as ‘Wearing a poppy bruise on his left temple,/He lay in the four foot box as in his cot…. the bumper knocked him clear. ’ From a state of almost morbid self-awareness, therefore, the narrator is brought into a contemplation of his brother’s body, a contemplation that leads him to reflect not just upon the subjective embarrassment he feels, but upon the objective tragedy of his brother’s death.