The Wednesday Poem/Song
Who Has Seen the Wind?
BY CHRISTINA ROSSETTIWho has seen the wind?
Neither I nor you:
But when the leaves hang trembling,
The wind is passing through.
Who has seen the wind?
Neither you nor I:
But when the trees bow down their heads,
The wind is passing by.
The poem begins with the speaker stating that he is being quarantined within a “sick bay” of his college. It is here he waited for his neighbours to come and pick him up and take him home. The boy has suffered a loss, one which does not become clear until the final line of the poem.
He travels home and is met by his suffering family. His father is crying, and his mother is unable to even speak. There are many strangers around attempting to sympathize with the family, but their efforts appear awkward and are often unwanted.
The body arrives via ambulance the next day and the boy takes a look at it when he is alone one morning. There are no great injuries that he can see but he knows this is due to the fact that this person was thrown by the bumper of a car. The final line states that the coffin will only be four feet long, the same length as the child’s age, making clear to the reader that the speaker has lost his young brother in a terrible accident.
In ‘Mid-Term Break’ Heaney engages with themes of loss and grief. It focuses on the aftermath of the car accident that killed Heaney’s younger brother. The accident is in the background of how everyone around Heaney responds. There is anger, pure sorrow, and detachment that he observes in his family members. The death threw off the family dynamic and shifted the way that everyone responded to everyday events. Gender roles shift, and the reader is left to contend with their own ideas of what grief looks like and how it can change one’s life.
It’s all in the last line. The outcome of anything you depends on what you put into it. A friendship will only be truly rewarding if you invest in it; likewise, you can cut a loaf of bread into ten pieces or five. It’s up to you, to a certain extent, to determine the outcome of parts of your life.
It basically means that everything is relative to how much effort you put into it. The key to the poem is in the last two lines. That’s where the “message” is. If you treat a friend well, like a loved one, then they will return the courtesy. If you treat a friend badly, they will return the favor.
I think it means you can control how things happen. That things are a certain way because of how they’ve been treated or how you’ve done something.
Well … I guess it’s also about how you see things in your own way.
Your day could have been wonderful … if you think it was and you say it is.
It depends. Could have been a lot, could have been a little. You can say if it was a lot, a little.
“Sick” is a poem that was published in the 1970 book called “Where the Sidewalk Ends” by the acclaimed poet, cartoonist, songwriter, and musician Shel Silverstein. It is the colloquy of a little girl named Peggy Ann McKay with her parents whom she is trying to convince not to send her to school. She comes up with all these symptoms of various dreadful diseases such as the mumps and the measles, the chickenpox and other whatnots. However, the moment she learns that today is Saturday, she’s miraculously healed and then rushes outside to play.
One of the themes of the poem is childhood innocence. She tries so hard to make her parents believe that she is sick not for once realizing that her lie has been long caught.The poem showcases a little girl’s determination for not going to school and her imagination that she uses to create symptoms that would prove her to be ailing. Her reluctance to go to school has unbarred her imagination and she shows no sign of slowing down until she has convinced everyone that she cannot go to school. She says that she has the measles and mumps and purple bumps, some rash and gash, tonsils the size of rocks and sixteen chicken pox.
She invents some more to add to her arsenal but the latter part of the poem is where we see her unique imagination as she discovers a few more symptoms. She claims that her hip hurts when she moves her chin and mentions that her belly button’s caving in and that her appendix “pains every time it rains”.The poem is written for children and can easily be related to by them because the scenario that the author uses is one that is a routine.