I sat all morning in the college sick bay
Counting bells knelling classes to a close.
At two o'clock our neighbours drove me home.
In the porch I met my father crying -
He had always taken funerals in his stride -
And Big Jim Evans saying it was a hard blow.
The baby cooed and laughed and rocked the pram
When I came in, and I was embarrassed
By old men standing up to shake my hand
And tell me they were "sorry for my trouble."
Whispers informed strangers I was the eldest,
Away at school, as my mother held my hand
In hers and coughed out angry tearless sighs.
At ten o'clock the ambulance arrived
With the corpse, stanched and bandaged by the nurses.
Next morning I went up into the room. Snowdrops
Heaney  enjambs  the end of one stanza and continues in the next, smoothing out an otherwise choppy sentence to imply comfort. His mother, clearly desperate, insecure and needing to be close to her other children, clutches his hand. 
 ‘Coughed out angry tearless sighs’ conveys a multitude of emotions — she is too tense to cry, angry at the loss of her child, her weeping emerges as dry sobs like coughs, perhaps because she is attempting to control her grief.
Mid-Term Break