Talk:Death and Transformation/@comment-124.189.16.152-20160511092313

The transformative quality of death in Heaney’s poetry does not only apply to the metaphorical death of one’s innocence or faith that evokes a significant change in person or character, but it also applies to the transformation of the individuals centred around death. For example, in ‘Requiem for Croppies’, it is the death of the ‘the broken wave’, those who’s deaths cause the hillside to blush, that ultimately lead to the barely growing ‘up out of the grave’. Without the death of those in the Irish Rebellion, the hope and inspiration the croppies represented, the seed that they planted may not have grown. Their deaths transformed the history of Ireland. As another example, it is Heaney’s brother Christopher’s death in ‘Mid-Term Break’ that leads to out of character transformations of those within the family. Heaney ‘met his father crying’. This breaks down the patriarchal image of the father figure within the 1950’s with his father losing his practical and ‘manly’ self. This also demonstrated the extent of tragedy for the family as Heaney’s father had ‘always taken funerals in his stride’.