The poem opens with a line that immediately establishes the speaker as a young college student, but creates a sense of foreboding at odds with the familiar environment of school: “I sat all morning in the college sick bay / counting bells knelling classes to a close” (Lines 1-2). The word “knelling” with its connotations of death is strange and unsettling in the context of a school, though the regular rhythm indicates something of the repetitiveness of college life. Line 3, “At two o’clock our neighbors drove me home,” emphasizes the breaking of this routine, and generates the movement of the poem into its next stanza.

The idea of home as a familiar and comforting setting exists only momentarily, as stanza two opens with the young speaker seeing his father crying in the porch. “He had always taken funerals in his stride,” Heaney tells us (Line 5), highlighting how out of character the father’s tears are. The type of comfort and reassurance the boy might need is lacking: His father cannot saying anything, as the use of dashes at the end of both of these lines suggests, while neighbors add only useless platitudes, like “Big Jim Evans saying it was a hard blow” (Line 6).