Blackberry Picking Seamus Heaney Analysis

From the beginning of the poem, the speaker tells of his naïve, consuming world of blackberries. Because the

Nevertheless, Trethewey lets her emotions and thoughts seep through specific words of the poem. With phrases such as “rotting,” “split,” and “plucked” you can see a hidden aggressiveness that only shows itself

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.

The title of the poem itself, which is quite literal, shows the simple emotions of a child; Heaney had been happy as the blackberries started to ripen, and frustrated as they started to rot. The ironical emotions of his past can also be seen through the change of his tone and the length of the two stanzas. In the first stanza, Heaney had been positive, excited, and full of anticipation. There is a more detailed description of the process of waiting, as the memory had still been vivid. In contrast, the second part of the poem is spoken in a disappointing and depressing tone, and it is also much shorter. Such methods are used to describe successfully the paradoxical emotions of Heaney’s

for instance, in the text, when he stated words like ``excruciating pain``, instead of saying, it hurt a lot. or ``March rain drilling his jacket and drilling his body and washing away the blood that poured from his open wound.`` instead of saying, it started to rain harder.Lastly,he hooked the reader in, by creating pictures using all of this. for example, the higher level words add feeling to the text. in the text, for instance, when the author says ``excruciating pain,`` I could almost feel the pain Andy was going through. the author adds picture to that by describing the knife, when it cut Andy.(The knife entered just below his rib cage and had been drawn across his body violently, tearing a wide gap in his flesh.) but then we also know, that none of this wouldn't have happened if Andy had been

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.

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.

For example, in the first half of the poem, which for the most part describes the country, the language is filled with beautiful sentences filled with adjective after adjective after adjective.  A simple encounter with cows in a field becomes "moo cows chomping daisies, our own / sweet saliva green with grass stems" (2-3).  But, on the entrance of the locomotive, the language changes.  The complex, drawn out, three-adjective statement "maple dappled summer sunlight" is replaced by a sterile and simple "lit headlight" (8).  From that point forward, the long sentences disappear.  Only when the couple experiences the mechanical real world, do they lose the power of language to describe what they see.

Delicacies such as the blackberries are “fat [and] overripe” (Kinnel 2) because of the time in late summer. Ripened blackberries are a luxury in the speaker’s mind because the speaker glorifies the blackberry in a sanguine manner. Clearly possessing a penchant for eating blackberries in this season, the speaker uses the imagery. The use of the word “icy” in lines 2 and 13 serves to compare the language and the blackberries (2,13). These two words also contrast with the warm weather of late September, which contrasts the typical words used in the English language versus the “peculiar” ones that Kinnel mentions in the poem.

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.

In the book The Pearl by John Steinbeck, the author uses description to change the mood throughout the first chapter. The first sentence of the chapter is a peaceful description of where the family lives, but as the chapter progresses, the mood changes from calm, to intense, then depressed. The first quote is the peaceful description of the nature: “The stars still shone and the day had drawn only a pale wash of light in the lower sky to the east.” The second quote explains how intense it was when Coyotito knock the scorpion down. “The throned tail jerked upright.

Sylvia Plath’s poem, “Blackberrying,” at first glance, suggests that the message of the poem will be about picking blackberries. However, the poem’s message is much deeper and far more complex than that alone. By the use of expressive, colorful, and detailed imagery and language, parallels between blackberries and Plath are made since it is evident that Plath is not only the speaker of the poem but the only human character in the story, as well. Within these parallels, “Blackberrying” dramatizes several areas of life and death such as in the emotions of loneliness and hopelessness, the struggle in dealing with a void, as well as life’s cycles and milestones. To begin with, there are seven different colors that Plath mentions throughout the poem which add to its expressive, obviously colorful, and detailed imagery and language.

Just like any other boy from a countryside, Seamus Heaney portrays feelings of pure excitement and joy in Blackberry-Picking. The length of the stanzas tell the readers how much he is looking forward to the day when the berries will ripen (a longer description is made of the process of waiting and picking the blackberries), and when “a glossy purple clot” appears “among others, red, green, hard as a knot,” Heaney finally starts to get ready. An image is created where he is running around and calling his friends to join him in picking blackberries. Also, the readers can almost feel the blackberries, which are still quite

All poetry aims to communicate an experience; a body of memory, sensation, or wisdom that contributes significant meaning to the life of a poet and of all human beings. It is the mystery of literature that one may speak of a single, physical incident, yet draw deep universal conclusions from it. Like the Christian dogma of the Word made Flesh, the Christ both fully mortal and fully divine, the best of poetry dwells paradoxically in the realms of both literal and figurative. Seamus Heaney's poem, Blackberry-Picking, exhibits a precise, elegant poetic technique that permits such a simultaneous existence. Through his use of overt religious allusions, intense, metaphorical imagery, and sharply contrasting symbols, Heaney reveals a young protagonist's journey from childhood to adulthood, or in essence, immaturity to maturity, with a focus on the speaker’s reconciliation with an inconvenient yet inevitable truth - in essence, creating a Bildungsroman.

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.