I am going to compare Mid-Term Break with On My First Sonne. The similarities between these two poems are the death of a child from within the family and also the innocence of the child as both of them died from a painful source. The differences between these poems are that Ben Jonson can accept the loss of his son as he feels the death was just whilst in Seamus Heaney’s poem the family feel the death is unjust and cannot accept their loss.
Mid-Term Break looks at the death of a young child from within the family. The child is the younger brother of the narrator and he was only four years old when he got hit by a car and died. Similarly On My First Sonne looks at the death of a young child. The child is the poet’s son who died at the age of seven from the plague.
The difference between these deaths is that in Mid-Term Break the family cannot accept the death. They feel that it is unjust, as the child was so young and innocent. Also the death comes as a surprise to the reader at the end because throughout the poem you get tricked into believing that someone else is dead. “Father crying” suggests that the mum has died and the father is upset that his wife has gone. This fools the reader, as at the end you find out that was a four-year-old child. In On My First Sonne the poet can accept the loss of his son. He feels that it is just and that his son has just been lent down to him by god and taken back after seven years. “Seven yeeres tho’wert lent to me, and I thee pay” this indicates that Ben Jonson believes that his son was only lent to him. Because he had his son for only seven years he feels that he did not have him for his whole life and god has taken him back after exactly seven years. Also Ben Jonson says that having too much hope for his son was a sin. “My sinne was too much hope of thee” this implies that he feels that having too much hope on his son put him under pressure and this was the cause of his death. Also this poem starts talking about the death using “farewell”. This hints that he is saying good-bye to his son and this is his way of letting him go.
In Mid-Term Break Seamus Heaney uses metaphors “wearing a poppy bruise” this helps create an image because even though we know the dead child is not literally wearing a poppy bruise we can imagine what the bruise would look like. This can also suggest that it is like the World War 1 because at the end of that the first plants to re-grow were the poppies. Also alliteration of fricatives is used in “a four foot box, a foot for every year.” This makes the text seem more aggressive. It uses this technique to show the families anger at the death of the young child.
