Wilkerson 1

Lucas Wilkerson
AP Literature and Composition
Mrs. Rutan
22 October 2018
Word Count 755

Oh the Humanity

When considering what separates humans from the rest of the animal kingdom, many

would discern that it’s intelligence — that thinking makes us different.

Those people would be wrong. Intelligence is what keeps things alive, whether gained

through books or instincts, it is the common thread that links everything alive today. That thing,

that special ingredient that makes humans special, is emotion. Humans complex relationship with

emotions, especially negative ones that linger in our minds, is highlighted in the poem

“Mid-Term Break” by Seamus Heaney. Heaney’s poem reminds us what it means to be human

— what it means to feel.

“Mid-Term Break” truly captures what it means to be human. Guided through responses

to grief by a coping narrator, the poem offers up raw emotion through the detached lens of loss.

The the father’s response, is one we often think of first: sorrow. The father is seen

“crying… [though] he had always taken funerals in his stride” (5). By portraying the father

figure — a figured usually thought of as “tough” — as breaking down, the reader immediately

understands how deeply the loss cuts. The father’s complex relationship with his grief has forced

him out of his comfort zone; grief has made the father react to the situation like never before. It
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has been said that there is nothing more sorrowful than seeing a grown man cry, this is no

different. The comment made about the father’s reaction being unusual, because he normally

controls his emotions only adds to the gravity of the situation.

The reader then observes the community’s response— an abundance of sympathy and empathy.

We know these feelings all too well, the giving and receiving of “thoughts and prayers” and the

little they do to comfort. We hear guest tell the narrator they were“sorry for [his] trouble,” and

continue on to small talk about the narrator being “the eldest” (11,12). We all know the feeling

of awkwardly bearing your soul and saying you “know how they feel” when the sad truth is, that

you’re on two vastly different planes of existence. We see where humans further separate

themselves from their animalistic roots, and attempt to share the pain of a loss rather that using it

as a head start in natural selection. The mother’s response being angry gives the reader a sense of

unfairness. Mothers are nurturing figures and to see one process loss so intensely with “angry

tearless sighs” — it resonates with our inner pathos (13). This anger is also one of the first clues

that the tragedy is caused by ​someone.​ When people die from things like disease or old age, we

feel the sorrow of the loss, but there is nothing to be angry at. Depicting a mother, someone that

we expect forgiveness from, as angry about the loss we instantly know it was unjust — we feel

it's unjust. The narrator visits a baby who doesn’t respond at all “[cooing and [laughing]” —

oblivious to the tragedy at hand (7). This is the ultimate case of ‘ignorance is bliss’. Babies are

sources of innocence and hope. They merely exist in a state of ignorance. The author shows us a

baby, something so out of place in a funeral setting to give relief from the tragedy. This break is

something our narrator so desperately needs. The narrators complex relationship with grief

hasn’t resulted in a outpouring of emotion like his parents, but in a lack of. The narrator has
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become numb to his surroundings and we see him drift through his own home like a ghost, at one

point even being “embarrassed by old men standing up to shake [his] hand” (8). The narrator’s

detachment is something we only truly understand in the last stanza, where we finally see what

happened— a life was cut abysmally short. The author makes the revel more dramatic by

rhyming the last to lines, giving a singsong quality to the relizations a mere toddler has died.

Ending one the line “a four foot box, a foot for every year” is the chilling send off the poem built

up to, the final strike to the readers emotions (22). The final line of the poem can be understood

with intelligence; however the final line is only truly comprehended with emotions.

This poem shows us the rawest forms of emotion, not intelligence. The poem resonates

with us because we understand emotion is something we all feel, something unique to us, a

complex relationship that no other being has quite captured— something human.