Newsletter Issue #55 February, 2016

So let’s move on, shall we?

To, first, this month’s  “secret poem” —  Seamus Heaney’s “Mid-term Break,” with some thoughts on the poem from Plume contributor Ed Meek.

Mid-Term Break

I sat all morning in the college sick bay
Counting bells knelling classes to a close.
At two o’clock our neighbours drove me home.

In the porch I met my father crying–
He had always taken funerals in his stride–
And Big Jim Evans saying it was a hard blow.

The baby cooed and laughed and rocked the pram
When I came in, and I was embarrassed
By old men standing up to shake my hand

And tell me they were ‘sorry for my trouble’.
Whispers informed strangers I was the eldest,
Away at school, as my mother held my hand

In hers and coughed out angry tearless sighs.
At ten o’clock the ambulance arrived
With the corpse, stanched and bandaged by the nurses.

Next morning I went up into the room. Snowdrops
And candles soothed the bedside; I saw him
For the first time in six weeks. Paler now,

Wearing a poppy bruise on his left temple,
He lay in the four-foot box as in his cot.
No gaudy scars, the bumper knocked him clear.

A four-foot box, a foot for every year.

On Seamus Heaney’s “Mid-term Break”

I had the pleasure of seeing Seamus Heaney a couple of years ago at the AWP Conference in Boston, not long before he died.  His poem, “Mid-term Break” is one I go back to every now and then. I’m half Irish and half Scottish and the song like quality of the poem appeals to me along with the emotional power that comes across, particularly at the end.  He wrote it in 1963 (the year, of course, JFK was assassinated). Heaney was only 24. It was the tenth anniversary of his younger brother Christopher’s death.  Part of what makes the poem so effective is that the title indicates it’s going to be a light poem. We think of mid-term breaks as party time, but in this poem, it’s when Heaney returns home for his little brother’s funeral.

The tone changes right away with the first stanza: “I sat all morning in the college sick bay/Counting bells knelling classes to a close.” Immediately, the poem begins to sound a little ominous with the knelling bells and the closing of classes.  That second line is near perfect to my ear–from the repeated sound of the personified bells, to the alliterative closing of classes.
By the second stanza we know he’s home for a funeral and even “Big Jim Evans” says it was “a hard blow.” Still, we’re not prepared when the speaker himself visits the corpse and sees the “poppy bruise on his left temple.” The adjective makes it seem so slight an injury. And then the devastating ending encapsulated in the last three lines. “He lay in the four-foot box as in his cot./No gaudy scars, the bumper knocked him clear./ A four-foot box, a foot for every year.” The monosyllables hammer home the gravity of the awful event.

Yet, throughout the poem, Heaney uses soft, quiet, reassuring language: “candles soothed the bedside,” “My mother held my hand,” “the baby cooed and laughed.” That language runs up against the harshness of the ending: the rough, unyielding consonants, knocked, foot, cot, box. The speaker has his family and neighbors there for emotional support, but there is no answer to someone who dies so young. Notice there is no blaming anyone in the poem. Of course we all have friends, classmates and relatives who died young. There’s no getting over those deaths and no answer for why they died really, but the shared experience and the beauty of a poem like this softens the blow.

One more comment. There is no question that we’re reading poetry here. Heaney had a great ear. He was able as Merwin put it, “to listen for the poem.”  We’re not always so good at listening, these days in America.

–Ed Meek, December 2015

And now to a few other matters:

As you open the homepage of Plume this month, you will find we’ve been tweaking again — no not that, but noodling around with our home page. We have a bit of a new look: the Editor’s Note, the Featured Selection, and Reviews up top now, as they probably should have been all along.  The Search function seems to be working well enough.  And we have a new addition to the Menu — Contributors, but, alas, that still is under construction. Soon! And those Archives — they have not escaped our attention, either, and I expect incremental progress on that front, as well. Fingers x-ed we have the excerpts figured out.  The rest is aesthetics — less white space around the Plume, a sharpened logo image, and the like.

Many thanks to Scott Karabenick at Massiveant — a wonderful tech guru and an amazing company — quick responses, calm, and patient — and expert at what he and they do. Sounds like a commercial, yes? It is, of sorts. If you find yourself in need of a tech company (and some of you already have asked me for a reference for such) to construct, overhaul, or tweak your website, this is the place to go — in  my non-tech-y opinion.

And — our New Work Received will resume soon — so many contributors to the anthology there hasn’t been room to note even the start of them.

Editor, Plume