Foreshadowing: A hint towards the beginning of a literary text of an event that will take
place later.
Example: "I sat all morning in the college sick bay / Counting bells knelling classes to a
close" ("Mid-Term Break" 1-2).
This example of foreshadowing in Heaney's "Mid-Term Break" comes at the very beginning
of the poem. The speaker is sitting in a "sick bay", or an infirmary, and is listening to the
bells "knelling" classes to a close. Foreshadowing occurs when an author hints at a future
event; the hint in these lines is the word "knell."
"Knell" implies a bell ringing, which is exactly what is happening at the beginning of
the poem. However, the word also has a strong connotation of death: often a bell that
"knells" does so in reference to a funeral, for example. Heaney has specifically used this
word to imply a funeral in a poem that is, in fact, about a funeral: later in the poem the
speaker sees his four-year-old brother in a coffin (20-22), which clearly shows that the
brother is dead.
In this poem, Heaney hints at death when he references a bell "knelling", shows us
that death in the middle of the poem when the speaker mentions "the ambulance arriv[ing]
/ with the corpse" (14-15), and then makes that death hit home when he makes clear the
relationship between the speaker and his dead four-year-old brother (20-22). The use of
foreshadowing in the word "knelling" is important because it gives us a specific tone from
the very beginning of the poem: if Heaney had used the word "ringing", for example, we
would be left with a straight-forward image of a bell doing what it is supposed to do—in
this case, announce that classes are over. But the specificity of "knelling" has a very
different effect, which is to let us know from the very beginning that this poem is not just
about a student or a "mid-term break", but that this break is related to the death of the
speaker's young brother.