Midterm Break

At first glance of "Mid-Term Break," it seems as if the speaker is very indifferent and emotionless over the death of his younger brother, however, after looking deeper into the poem, it becomes apparent that Seamus Heaney uses time and age to express the speaker's feelings of grief.
First, Heaney uses time to express both the speaker's impatience and his feelings of fear and regret. The first stanza is...

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

This stanza gives a few examples of time expressing the impatience felt by the speaker. First, he says that he "sat all morning....counting bells..." This phrase can be counted as either boredom, in a regular setting, however in the context of the poem, it shows how the speaker is waiting to go home - the morning seems to strech out longer, as his impatience causes time to slow. Just as when one counts sheep as they wait to go to sleep, the speaker counting bells can be seen as his way to pass the time, and makes the time seem much longer. The second way Heaney uses time to express impatience is with his use of "two o'clock" and later in the poem, "ten o'clock." These two times are very important, and are the key times when the wait which the speaker experiences ends. At two o'clock, he was able to go home. At ten o'clock, the abulance arrives with his brother's body. By using specific times, Heaney really expresses that the whole day is centered around those two events, and that the time inbetween is just a waiting game.
Heaney also uses time to show the speaker's feelings of fear and regret. Even though the corpse had arrived at 10 o'clock that night, the speaker waited until the next morning to go up into the room to see his brother. This wait can be interpretted that the speaker could not go up to see his brother the night before, it was too painful, and it would destroy the denial that he was feeling over his brother's death (stages of grief). Heaney then uses the speaker saying that he "saw him for the first time in six weeks" to express a feeling of regret and guilt, as the speaker realizes that squandered that time that he could have spent with his brother.
Finally, Heaney uses age to show the overwhelming feelings of sadness felt by the speaker. The fourth stanza shows a contradiction between the age of the actual speaker-

"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"

As seen, he is said to be the eldest and is away at school, so it is assumed that he is an adult, or young adult. However, it is shown in the line following that the speaker is holding his mother's hand. This reduces the speaker back into the role of a small child, taking comfort in his mother. There is also the use of "old men" and the "baby." This could result in a number of different interpretations. Heaney could be hitting upon how a full life is the progression from a baby to an old man, and it furthurs the tragedy of the young boy's death that he was not able to experience that. It could also be that all the "old men" were not all old men at all, however to the speaker's reduced age, or in comparison to the boy's short life, all other ages simply seem old.