In Funeral Rites, Heaney depicts various attitudes towards death, which are amplified in North as a collection, through its distinct tripartite structure. In the first section, Heaney focuses on his admiration for the ceremony he experienced at funerals in the past. The transition from past to present is confirmed by the strong adverb "Now", and lines 33-39 focus on the unrest in Northern Ireland. since the 1960s. The future beginning in line 40 addresses Heaney's hope for the future, emphasizing the current lack of ritual. Heaney begins Funeral Rites: “I assumed a kind of manhood.” The choice of the phrase "shoulder" implies physically carrying the coffin, but also alludes to the emotional burden associated with maturity and manhood. This is reminiscent of Mid Term Break, when Heaney "felt embarrassed by the old men who stood up to shake his hand",1 implying his mature role at the funeral while he was still a schoolboy . However, although Heaney comes across as uncomfortable with this role in Mid Term Break, he more openly embraces manhood in Funeral Rites, as implied by the comma ending the first line. This piece of punctuation suggests his maturity and illustrates his acceptance of this role. Funerals are an important final rite of passage in a person's life (as the title suggests), but funerals also seem to act as milestones for Heaney, as he matures. The second and third stanzas of Funeral Rites are very descriptive, as Heaney describes it: "their knuckles swollen." This close, sensory description of the body is present in many of his bog poems, but particularly in The Grauballe Man, for, like Funeral Rites, Heaney devotes several stanzas to the direct, direct medium of the paper. .....from the first part in everything, from technique and tone to approach to the subject. While in the first part Heaney addresses political issues and death through metaphors and the symbolism of the bog poems, he provides a more direct response in the second part, expressing his opinion in a more frank and direct manner, as in Whatever you say, say. Nothing. In Funeral Rites, Heaney demonstrates his fascination with death and alludes to the customs that accompany it, while only briefly referencing the violence caused by the Irish Civil War. This contrasts profoundly with the rest of the North, as Heaney moves from depicting death as natural and customary in part one, to savage and bloodthirsty in part two.BibliographyParker, Michael: The Making of the Poet: Seamus Heaney, 1993Lloyd, David: The Two Voices of the North by Seamus Heaney, 1979