Analysis Of Blackberry Picking By Seamus Heaney

In Yusef Komunyakaa’s “Blackberries,” a youthful speaker seems to be living past the boundaries of city life and exhibits qualities of rural living. The poem tells of the speaker’s adventure of picking blackberries from a thicket and encountering the duality of urban society. Readers of “Blackberries” might at first be puzzled by the speaker’s youthful memory of picking berries, but a closer analysis of the poem allows readers to recognize that the speaker’s internal conflict originates from strict societal boundaries and the loss of his childhood innocence.

Two of the poems written by Seamus Heaney, “Digging” and “Blackberry Picking”, contain recurring themes while both discussing entirely different scenes. The first poem, “Digging”, talks about Heaney’s memories of hearing his father digging in the potato garden outside the house. The second poem, “Blackberry-Picking”, carries a similar solemn tone, while describing another memory of Heaney’s of his experience with picking blackberries. These poems by Heaney share similar themes of reflection of his past experiences in which he dissects important life lessons from everyday events such as the passage of time and the uncertainty of life.

Written in 1980, Galway Kinnell's Blackberry Eating is a poem which creates a strong metaphoric relationship between the tangible objects of blackberries, and the intangible objects of words. The speaker of the poem feels a strong attraction to the sensory characteristics (the touch, taste, and look) of blackberries. The attraction he feels at the beginning of the poem exclusively for blackberries is paralleled in the end by his appetite and attraction to words. The rush the speaker gets out of blackberry eating is paralleled to the enjoyment he finds in thinking about certain words; words which call up the same sensory images the blackberries embody.

In the second stanza, the author employs several metaphors that display the growing and nurturing of a tree which is compared to the feeding of hate and vanity. The lines “ And I watered it in fears […] And I sunned it with smiles” refers to a plant by using words like “watered” and “ sunned” (“Poison” 5-7). These lines demonstrate the reason why the trees keep growing because he takes care of it “night and morning”, which suggests that the “wrath” has taken over the speaker’s life completely, and it is not healthy for both of them.

The poem "Blackberries" by Yusef Komunyakaa, tells the story of a carefree young boy who enjoys spending his past time picking blackberries in the forest, until he is confronted with the reality of his obvious lack. Yusef Komunyakaa effectively uses symbolism and figurative language to demonstrate man's conflict with society and himself.

In Seamus Heaney’s poem, “Blackberry-Picking”, the author utilizes diction, alliteration, and rhyme in order to express his discontent in how greedy people can become when they desire something. Heaney wishes to present this idea to his reader through very aggressive diction. The poet juxtaposed the “summer’s blood” (7) in his poem with the juice, or “blood” of blackberries, admiring the fruit for its addicting taste which reawakens his temptation every summer. Had Heaney chosen weaker diction in this metaphor, the individual reading this poem would not feel such powerful emotions towards Heaney’s message about nature’s fragility when injured by human greed. Also, Heaney associates “blood” with the juice of the berries since humans need blood to live, but there are times when

The first stanza uses concrete imagery to depict a working man “with cracked hands that ached” (3), the speaker’s father, starting a fire. The second stanza starts with warm connotations of the fire rescuing his home from the cold; however, the stanza ends with the speaker expressing his fear, a figurative coldness, of “the chronic angers of that house” (9). The third stanza completes the epiphany that the final line of the first stanza, “No one ever thanked him” (5) hints at. It is at this point that the speaker understands that his father expresses his love differently. While the speaker was looking for an overt expression of his father’s love, his father, a working man, can only show his love with the means by which he is familiar. To the father, love is an expression of actions, actions that the speaker is oblivious to during his childhood. By the setting being early Sunday morning, it shows that the father’s actions, as a symbol of his love, are omnipresent and supersede his own desire for rest. The final lines of every stanza reflect the speaker’s growing realization that he was indeed loved by his father, that he initially didn’t recognize his father’s actions as an expression of this love, and that his obliviousness to this unfamiliar expression of love helped contribute to what

Though the poem focuses heavily on the speaker’s attempts to satisfy his desire, no greater purpose appears to lie at the end of his quest. The “plate of eyes” that “burned” suggests that the speaker feels like he’s being watched, as if someone is standing and judging him for his thirst. The word “burned” implies that the feeling of being observed left a painful impression on him. The pickers leave the field with “hands peppered with thorn pricks, our palms sticky as Bluebeard’s” (16). The choice of a comparison to Bluebeard, the violent murderer from a fairytale, suggests that the speakers links his desire with a violent, destructive act, further illustrating the way lust and desire is tangled up with guilt. Those who desire as the pickers do are haunted and tormented by the fruitlessness of their efforts. Furthermore, the poem is structured such that, for the most part, the ends of the lines do not quite rhyme. The “almost rhymes” throughout the poem mirror the disappoint the speakers feels; lines that come close to rhyming are just short of satisfying to read, similar to how the pickers’ quest does not quite fulfill their desire. By interweaving pain and disappointment with the blackberry picking process, the author suggests that with excess greed and desire comes pain and suffering. The pickers know, at least subconsciously, that their trek through the fields has neither an end goal nor a

Imagery in “Blackberry Eating” Memories of late summer. Free from all inhibitions, the ideas of family and plentiful growth are on the mind. As the growing season concludes and the produce ripens, the ease at which they fall from the vine heightens. This scene is depicted in Galway Kinnel’s poem, “Blackberry Eating” and he uses several literary devices to describe this scene and compare the nature of blackberry eating and the nature in which humans speak. Moreover, Kinnel employs the use of imagery in the poem by describing the quality of the blackberries and the manner in which they are eaten.

The first time this theme is revealed in the poem “Blackberry-Picking” is while the author describes the first blackberry ripens. He recalls, “You ate that first one and its flesh was sweet. ”(Source A.) The blackberries in this poem represent ones childhood. He compares to the innocence of being a child to eating blackberries for the first time after they ripen.

Robert Herrick was a 17th century poet, born and raised in England, a huge focus in his poetry was his Christian faith. A common theme among all Herrick’s poetry is that life is fleeting so to find the beauty in the world and fall in love. A popular work of Herrick’s, “The Vine,” follows a man that dreams of himself as a vine and sexualizes a woman, Lucia. In “The Vine,” Herrick utilizes allusion and diction to demonstrate the theme of perversion.

The poems “First Snow” by Mary Oliver and “After Apple-Picking” by Robert Frost use wildly different poetic forms to achieve much the same practical goal: to describe and represent the first snow of winter. In comparing these two works one is reminded of the universality of experience that makes poetry possible. In contrasting the two one is reminded of the unique creativity and range of expression that makes poetry precious. A synthesis of the two is a solid statement on the power of good poets.

Seamus Heany describes his times of when him and his family would go picking blackberries very explicit. When he mentioned about the activities that took place, the berries seemed to come alive because of how much personification was implemented into them, “and it's flesh was sweet... summer's blood was in it.” As he goes on describing it, the berries take form of two of the seven deadly sins: lust and gluttony. Him and his family would not stop picking no matter how much pain they went through because they were “addicted” to the taste and could not have enough. These are only the physical aspect though.

Once the reader can passes up the surface meaning of the poem Blackberry-Picking, by Seamus Heaney, past the emotional switch from sheer joy to utter disappointment, past the childhood memories, the underlying meaning can be quite disturbing. Hidden deep within the happy-go-lucky rifts of childhood is a disturbing tale of greed and murder. Seamus Heaney, through clever diction, ghastly imagery, misguided metaphors and abruptly changing forms, ingeniously tells the tale that is understood and rarely spoken aloud.

Blackberry picking by Seamus Heaney is about time, gluttony, limitations of life, and to some extent, the struggles of life. Heaney writes retrospectively about his life, with hindsight, about how he as a child, would go blackberry picking during a particular time of year.