Nobel Prize winner Seamus Heaney is renowned for writing poems about his personal childhood memories with strong influences from his Irish heritage and countryside. One of the ideas Heaney communicates is the journey and rhythms of life and death, particularly by confronting. In `Mid-Term Break', Heaney's poignant vignette of his younger brother's death and its impact forces him to confront death and mortality. However Heaney uses `Follower' to contrast the different stages of people's lives. Both poems effectively use symbols to develop these ideas.

Symbolism is used to foreshadow the sorrow and mourning of death. In the first stanza of `Mid-Term Break', Heaney introduces the poem by waiting in the "college sick bay", a place connoted with disease, illnesses and death itself, especially since the poem is a vignette of...