Way to make me feel bad every time I hear "Mid-Term Break"...

Whilst perusing the poems for this section, I was surpised to see one entitled "Mid Term-Break." The title is admittedly deceptive, and I thought I'd be reading a silly little piece about someone's antics during their break. I was proven wrong in the first line, "I sat all morning in the college sick bay" (Heaney). Right away, you get the feeling that something is wrong, no one spends all day in a health center unless they have to. It already sets the tone as something a little less than mirthful.

And by the beginning of the second stanza, we get a feeling that is going to be a very sad experience for the reader, and the speaker. It starts with "In the porch I met my father crying-" (Heaney), and reading that somewhat jolts one. In countless narratives and stories, the father figure is rigid, stoic figure who does not cry at all unless the situation they're reacting to is of the utmost tragedy. And that's what it signals to the reader, that this is beyond a student simply not feeling well, and it centers around tragic events. This is proven true in the rest of the stanza, where we learn that this is taking place at a funeral, but at the moment, we do not know for who.

Then, the beginning of the third stanza struck me as something so out of place from the rest of the poem. "The baby cooed and laughed and rocked the pram" (Heaney). This seems to misdirect us from the tone already established, but it could merely be symbolism. Here we have a baby at a funeral, life and death side by side. The child, so innocent, does not know what is going on, and instead finds joy in this new world, while others are rocked by tragedy.

In the fourth stanza, a little more light is shed on the circumstances. We see that "Whispers informed I was the eldest, away at school..." (Heaney), and the curtain is pulled back a little more. We do not know for sure, but casually mentioning the speaker is the eldest means that in context, the events revolve around one of the younger siblings. This would explain the father crying, and the mother's own reaction, "... as mother held my had/ In hers and coughed out angry tearless sighs." Yes, next to the father who is so overtaken with grief we have a mother who has not shed a tear. To some she may seem merely impatient and unmoved by the tragic events, but when we see in the context established, she is just the opposite. She cannot shed a tear, because she is too angry with a life and world in which something so precious to her must be taken away.

By the end, we get the full reveal. We see this is about someone who was killed when a car struck him. "He lay in the four foot box as in his cot/ No gaudy scars, the bumper knocked him clear" (Heaney). So now we get a picture of what has happened, and it seems like a freak accident that has rattled a family to it's core. Of course, the final line cements the heartbreak for the reader, "A four foot box, a foot for every year" (Heaney).

Booth, Alison, and Kelly J. Mays. The Norton Introduction to Literature. New York: W.W. Norton &, 2011. Print.

The Misfit's Gambit

Flannery O'Connor's short story, "A Good Man Is Hard To Find," takes place in the South in the early 50's or so (it is never mentioned in the text, but that is the general consensus of the time period). It features a mildly eclectic family, with a slight focus on the grandmother, the mildly racist, judgmental, manipulative, hypocritical, "set in her ways" grandmother. By far the most developed character in the story, the narration seems to lend itself a bit to her own perceptions and biases. Nonetheless this tale begins with this eccentric family headed off on a trip and encountering interesting people on the way. When first reading it, it reminded me slightly of the movie Little Miss Sunshine near the beginning. But near the end we encounter the big ol' bad guy (and excellent use of Checkov's Gun), The Misfit. The Misfit and granny get into a nice spiritual debate, which end up with *SPOILER ALERT* everyone in the family dead.

What intersted me the most about this story was the dynamic of The Misfit and the grandmother, and what their debate entailed and really meant. After all, this is a thief, a criminal, and murderer talking about Jesus with an old lady as her family is murdered by his posse. With this exchange, this interaction, I think this was the story's attempt at pointing out the skewed morality of modern day Christianity. They touch on this directly, when talking about how Jesus rose the dead, with The Misfit saying, "and He shouldn't have done it. He shown everything off balance. If He did what He said, then it's nothing for you to do but thow away everything and follow Him, and if He didn't, then it's nothing for you to do but enjoy the few minutes you got left the best way you can by killing somebody or burning down his house or doing some other meanness to him." (P. 408) This is actually a section in The Bible, one which states that the followers of Christ should abandon all their earthly possesions and follow a life of absolute piousness. But, compared to the modern day view, even the one exemplified by the grandmother, does that really seem like the morality is held? Or is it simply a pick and choose view by this society to selfishly serve the self and morality be damned? It strays far from any sort of true absolute morality, and maybe that could be yet another symbol for The Misfit, the truth of the absoluteness of any type of religion, versus the self serving societal view of the grandmother, who could really be representing all of society. When you look at it this way, it becomes ever the more grim, and humorous (in an admittedly dark way) when The Misfit says, "She would have been a good woman if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life." (P. 409)
O’Connor, Flannery. “A Good Man Is Hard To Find.” The Norton Introduction to Literature.10^th ed. Peter Simon.  New York, NY: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc, 2011. 396-409.

Two Quatrains About Humanity

To hear the songs and see the lies,
Of anarchal thoughts that make up our minds,
One must disect the gossamer lines,
Of the Archon’s knot that we all comprise.

But what of tangled beings we weave,
When every thought does touch deceive,
And only at our new being’s eve,
Do we take our knowledge and let our body leave.

Made of Text

I am a purely typographical being,
I only make sense in written form,
I am only understood, when written,
I only inspire, connect and attract,
When I comprise of myself of ink and letters,
My most comfortable, my prime state,
Is when I’m made of text.

To some, this is blessing,
To me, this is a curse,
For this world we live in is not illiterate,
But they lack comprehension of reading,
Letters are just letters to them,
They lack multiple insights to a single word,
Let alone a text comprised being,
So my chances of being read,
For someone to do what I want them to do most,
To read and to truly understand me fully,
Is so little, it inspires hopelessness.

I am made of text and yet not read,
A dusty book on a shelf,
Awaiting a reader that never comes.