Mid-Term Break

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1966

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Summary

Background

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Background

Literary Context

Philip Hobsbaum, who was a mentor figure to a group of promising young Northern Irish poets that included Derek Mahon and Michael Longley, identified Heaney’s poetic potential when Heaney was at school in Belfast. This coterie of fellow poets was vital for the young Heaney, who honed his craft by submitting early poems to the rigorous criticism of Hobsbaum and the others. Heaney has commented that the greatest thing he gained from his association with this group was their advice to trust and articulate the formative experiences of his rural Derry childhood (“Seamus Heaney”: Poetry Foundation, 2013). Mahon and Longley attempted to do something similar, preferring to comment on the trauma and tragedy of contemporary Ireland from observation of ostensibly rural scenes. Critic Neil Astley has identified this adherence to simple personal experience as a defining feature of late 20th century poetry, which celebrates “human and spiritual values instead of mirroring cultural fragmentation” (Introduction to Staying Alive, 2002).

This period of poetry also featured a preference for taking as subject matter the natural world rather than mechanization, urban life, or popular culture. For instance, Ted Hughes, Seamus Heaney’s English contemporary and friend, returned time and again to animals and nature as the sources of his poetic inspiration. Writing about rural themes could make Heaney appear conservative, but his clear discomfort with his inexpressive community, as shown in “Mid-Term Break” and in the title of the collection Death of a Naturalist, make it clear that his work does not idealize rural life. Rather, Heaney remained skeptical of pastoral poetry, drawing a distinction between a younger naïve self who simply observed nature, and the older self who tries to draw meaning from the experience. Heaney cannot be categorized as a poet of rural withdrawal; he wrote in a context of engagement with the real world with all its violence and complexity, nowhere more so than in Northern Ireland during the period of the Troubles.

Historical context

In the 1920s, after a protracted Irish War of Independence against the UK and a Civil War between forces for and against the Anglo-Irish Treaty that ended the War of Independence, Ireland cemented Home Rule for the Republic, with Dublin as its capital. A somewhat arbitrary border was created, keeping the North of the island in British hands and leaving the Catholics who lived there as a largely impoverished minority in a Protestant-run state ruled from London. Sectarian tensions rose in the ensuing decades, and in mid-1960s Ireland, when Heaney was living in Belfast and writing Death of a Naturalist, the Protestant and Catholic factions were coming into increasingly more violent conflict over the future of Northern Ireland.

In many ways, the hardships of the rural community to which the Heaneys belonged transcended issues of religion, nationalism, and ethnicity, and were rooted instead in the harsh conditions of trying to make a living out of the soil. Farmers continued to use old fashioned methods, plowing the land by spade, as Heaney recalls in the poem “Digging.” Tremendous emphasis was placed on physical endurance, work, and a stoic attitude that could resist exhaustion and keep performing practical tasks with accuracy and skill. By contrast, a facility with words and academic prowess was not highly valued, so when Heaney began to show this type of promise, he would to an extent have been cutting himself off from the tradition of his farming father and the strong inarticulate men like “Big Jim Evans” who appear in “Mid-Term Break.” The distance from the family home to St Columb’s College, where Heaney was sent on a scholarship to study, would have represented the gap between father and son in terms of education and outlook on life. Yet the physical return home prompted by the death of his younger brother is also a metaphorical return to his roots.

The history of rural life is inextricably linked to the soil and what it can produce. In later collections, Heaney used the soil as a metaphor to trace history back far beyond his own family. By the time he wrote the collection North in 1975, he was reaching back into medieval times and even prehistory for his subject matter, as if he was searching for the roots of the violence that plagued Northern Ireland.