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- 5 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 10 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 15 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, 20 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. This is an incredibly sad poem. The mood is set almost immediately in the second line: Counting bells knelling classes to a close. Notice how Heaney uses assonance and alliteration to emphasise the funereal sound of the bells and the feeling of time dragging.
The stanza begins with the ‘morning’ in line one but it is two o’clock in line three showing that hours have passed in waiting. The second stanza begins with the image of Heaney’s father ‘crying’. Having come across Heaney’s father in poems such as Follower in which he appears to be a strong man of few words, this contrary picture evokes powerful emotion in the reader. Heaney skilfully takes the reader with him as he enters the house through the porch – we meet his father, ‘Big Jim Evans’, the baby in its pram, the old men congregated in the room and finally Heaney’s mother coughing out ‘angry tearless sighs’. Lines 14-15 again show Heaney using assonance, this time in his repetition of the short ‘a’ – ‘At’, ‘ambulance’, ‘arrived’, ‘stanched’, ‘and’, ‘bandaged’ – emphasising the stopping short of blood and life. We learn in the sixth stanza that Heaney hadn’t seen his brother for six weeks having been ‘Away at school’.
The Homework on Line Father Ship People
Dear Grandfather, December 22, 1880 We finally arrived, mother father and I. we all miss you grandmother and china so much. How is everything, we are all fine... We got off Angel Island three days ago and now we are at our new home. Its not the greatest especially compared to our home with you and grandmother in China, but I have to say that anything is better than the ship ride here, to America. ...
The words ‘Paler now,’ hang at the end of the stanza causing a sad pause before the sentence continues and describes how little changed in appearance the boy is in death, the difference being his paler complexion and ‘poppy bruise’. The final line stands out on its own. Almost every word is emphasised so that the reader must take in the line’s message and the shock and deep grief that the family must have felt. There is an element of shock for the reader reading it for the first time also, when they discover who has died and that he was a mere four years old.
