Miracle on St David’s Day

Follower

Structure and Form

• Each verse contains four lines which rhyme (exactly or closely) alternately. The
first five verses have a regular metre, each line having eight syllables. The last
verse, to emphasise the confusion of his adult feelings towards his now old and
more dependent father, has a different metre. The first, third and fourth lines have
nine syllables and the second only seven.

Comparative Ideas

• Family relationships – Any Heaney poem here (except Death of a Naturalist and
The Barn) Old Man, Old Man, Once Upon A Time. Look at the ways Heaney
(and/or other poets) remembers their parents and how their relationships have
changed, even sometimes reversed. In the case of Once Upon A Time the father
envies the son the openness and honesty he once had before a different culture
forced him to conform to behaviour he found hypocritical and false.