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Possible Topics for “Mid-Term Break”

Seamus Heaney’s “Mid-Term Break” offers many possible topics to write a paragraph about.

By Friday my seniors will have to annotate Seamus Heaney’s “Mid-Term Break” as well as write an insightful paragraph about it. Writing about poetry is not easy for them, so to get them ready, to sort of grease the wheels, we did a little brainstorming for possible topics. The above photo shows what my whiteboard looks like after such a brainstorming session.

Mid-Term Break

What my whiteboard looks like after we get done discussing possilbe meanings of the title of Seamus Heaney’s “Mid-Term Break.”

In my class the whiteboard is becoming more an essential tool for thought, helping us to capture what we think and challenging us to explain why we think it. For example, today my seniors read “Mid-Term Break” by Seamus Heaney as their poem of the week. In both periods we discussed the possible meanings of the title, which at first seems not at all related to the topic of a young boy who’s killed in an accident. But after scratching away at the surfaces, we began to see the title as rich in nuance and hidden meanings. The connotations of the three words almost overwhelm the poem itself. I wrote our brainstorming on the whiteboard and took a snapshot with my old digital camera.

Poem of the week: The Darkling Thrush, by Thomas Hardy

The Keatsian image of the thrush produces one of Hardy’s most lyrical poems

At once a voice arose among/ The bleak twigs overhead/ In a full-hearted evensong/ Of joy illimited ... - Hardy

[[Thomas Hardy]] and his thrush belongs to the Romantic tradition, in which birds express emotion in “songs” that inform human lives. Hardy was close enough to the 19th century to be able to present the bird as a symbol of hope for the new century. Later on in his career, Hardy became more, not less, despairing — expressed in the great poem of 1912 about the sinking of the Titanic, “The Convergence of the Twain.”

In 1899, however. Hardy was more optimistic. His dark pessimism had yet to metastasize. I agree with most commentators who consider the thrush to represent the poet himself since he was frail and bird-like in appearance and filled, at the time of this poem’s composition, with an abundant hope for the future.

Let the poet-thrush’s “happy good night air” sing us into the new year, with all my thanks and good wishes to friends old and new.

The Darkling Thrush

I leant upon a coppice gate
When Frost was spectre-grey,
And Winter’s dregs made desolate
The weakening eye of day.
The tangled bine-stems scored the sky
Like strings of broken lyres,
And all mankind that haunted nigh
Had sought their household fires.

The land’s sharp features seemed to be
The Century’s corpse outleant,
His crypt the cloudy canopy,
The wind his death-lament.
The ancient pulse of germ and birth
Was shrunken hard and dry,
And every spirit upon earth
Seemed fervourless as I.

At once a voice arose among
The bleak twigs overhead
In a full-hearted evensong
Of joy illimited;
An aged thrush, frail, gaunt and small,
In blast-beruffled plume,
Had chosen thus to fling his soul
Upon the growing gloom.

So little cause for carolings
Of such ecstatic sound
Was written on terrestrial things
Afar or nigh around,
That I could think there trembled through
His happy good-night air
Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew
And I was unaware.