Comparison of We Are Seven by William Wordsworth and Mid-Term Break by Seamus Heaney

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Comparison of We Are Seven by William Wordsworth and Mid-Term Break by Seamus Heaney

William Wordsworth was a defining member of the English Romantic

Movement. As we can see from reading his poem, his personality and

love of nature is conveyed. Wordsworth was probably inspired from his

upbringing and most of his mature life living in the Lake District

with picturesque landscapes influencing a true love of nature. Some

describe Wordsworth as a profoundly earnest and sincere thinker who

displays a high seriousness tempered with tenderness and a love of

simplicity.

Seamus Heaney had a rather conflicting upbringing as he also grew up

in the country- watching American soldiers in the local fields around

1944. Heaney has taken this image of himself as a consciousness

suspended between history and ignorance as representative of the

nature of his poetic life and development. Heaney has also worked as a

professor of Poetry at Oxford University and has also won the Nobel

Prize for literature.

The poem Mid-Term Break is about memories of death from a child's

point of view and the difficulty with other people's emotions. From my

research I have found out that the poem is based upon a real event in

Heaney's life and what he can remember from his own childhood. The

difficulties he faced included coping with his own mother's anger -

anger not with her son but with God for letting her child die. Heaney

can only be alone in order to mourn along with the 'snowdrops and

candles'. We can come to the conclusion that this may have been the

first experience of death of someone close to him.

Similarly, We are Seven is about a young girl who is convincing the

reader that her family consists of seven although a few of them are

dead. Death links these two poems together along with the sorrow and

mixed emotions of losing a loved one who was very close to you in each

case a brother and also sisters. It is a genuinely moving piece which

is a realisation of the reality of situations happening in the world

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