Heaney Blackberry-Picking

Suffering is an obstacle that everyone has to confront at all times in their life. Most of time, suffering is painful. However, if people consider it as a chance for learning, they can gain a broader appreciation of life and success. They will grow one step further in the process of overcoming and stepping out from the disincentive. However, confronting suffering is not necessarily drawing the beneficial consequences: sometimes, suffering seems ultimately pointless. It may ruin people devastatingly and even lead them to the dehumanization by drawing out their negative hidden traits. A Long Way Gone--a book of Ishmael’s dreadful memories of being a boy soldier and the atrocious truth of the war--and Othello--a tragedy of jealousy, vengeance, and love--indicate those two

Second, striking similes are used throughout the whole poem. The speaker does not content himself with using age-old phrases or comparisons. His similes are unique and gripping. "Like old beggars under sacks," "like a man in fire or lime," and "like a devil's sick of sin," help to add vivid mental pictures to the poem. The soldier's uniforms are ripped and threadbare from all the fighting, and they are so exhausted that they bend over as they walk. The man that breathed the mustard gas is in such incredible pain that all he can do is jerk about as if he were on fire. After a while, the gas causes his face to sag until he resembles something from the horrors of hell. The speaker's similes are ones that cause the reader to stop and just think about what is being described

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.

fair”, you can tell this is the voice of a child. There is also a

“Slavery in the south was brutal as anybody could imagine” an idea expressed by Jean Toomer through his poem called “November Cotton Flower”. The poem is fourteen lines of rhyming verse describing the harsh, sudden and questionable bloom of a cotton flower in the month of November. It is composed of heroic couplets, with a regular rhyme scheme, which is as follows: A, A, B, B, C, C, D, D, E, E, F, G, H, H, but the poem reads like Shakespearian sonnet - three quatrains developing a certain tone and theme, followed by a couplet that undercuts or reverses them. In the beginning it portrays the scuffle for survival of cotton flower during November’s harsh winter weather; but towards the end, it describes the sudden bloom of it. The author goes in depth with most of the descriptions to give a reader a clear and strong mental image.

Cullen’s use of Simile provides the reader with vivid and specific details about the poem and what is means. These include phrases like “Your grief and mine must intertwine like sea and river,” where we can see use of simile to create vivid pictures of how humans should “intertwine” their emotions with others. Also, another use of simile in the text is when Cullen describes the pain of grief when she says “The ills I sorrow at not me alone like an arrow, Pierce to the marrow”. Through this passage we see the tone of grievance as well as the authors call for human togetherness and

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.

George Gascoigne’s sonnet, “For That He Looked Not upon Her,” portrays a sullen man, hurt by the woman he loved. Through the uses of form, diction, and imagery, the sonnet evokes a complex attitude in each quatrain elaborating on the stages of torment the speaker receives from his ex-lover. By using these literary devices, the speaker portrays the dangers of desire and the conflicts that arise from within it. Gascoigne conveys a solemn and melancholy complex attitude developed throughout the use of such literary devices. The attitude of the speaker, expressed through the form of the sonnet, explains the dangers of gazing at the woman who burned him.

Inner conflicts often dictate what the narrator wants, but cannot have, which creates the overall attitude of the poem. The narrator struggles to look at this woman because his "eyes take no delight to range/ about the gleam which on your face do grow" (3-4). He is not able to look at her even though she is beautiful due to the heartbreak that she left him with. This attitude carries on throughout the poem where he acknowledges her beauty but is unwilling to be hurt by her again. He is in agony from the emotions that she inflicts, and the readers see his mental process of working through it as he comes to the conclusion that he will "wink or else hold down my head" because it is her eyes that cause his "bale" (14-15). His attitude changes from being at war with his inner feelings to being accepted to the fact that if he looks at her he will be in danger of being hurt a second time. The irony being applied shows how his conflicted attitude is made clear by acknowledging that he will not give in to his desire despite what his repressed emotions are saying. Irony can be highly influential in discovering the narrator's hidden agenda and purposes, and the words chosen to reveal these purposes have an impact on the overall attitude of a piece of

Suffering is a part of life, just like joy and love is. We can never choose how life treats us, but we can always choose how we react and get back up again. Through Fever 1793 we see up close and personal how suffering can affect us, and how sometimes it can affect us in positive ways. How suffering can help turn the page to the next chapter in our lives. How suffering doesn’t always mean losing, but also gaining.

The apple sits on a white plate. The plate has the words ‘For You’ on it. The plate was something I added to the poem. Since the narrator’s enemy knew that the apple belonged to the narrator, the plate shows that the narrator was ready for his enemy to take the apple. The words inscribed on the plate are used to appeal to the enemy to guarantee that he eats the poison. The words are written in black to magnify the toxicity of the narrator’s hatred for their foe. The plate is white to appeal to the enemy. White signifies innocence, purity, and peace. When the enemy sees the plate, they would not guess that it is holding a lethal apple. The grass covers some of the plate up to make the painting more realistic. Grass would naturally get onto the

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.

William Blake was a painter, engraver and poet of the Romantic era, who lived and worked in London. Many of Blake’s famous poems reside in his published collection of poems titled Songs of Innocence and of Experience. This collection portrays the two different states of the human soul, good and evil. Many poems in the Songs of Innocence have a counterpart poem in the Songs of Experience. The poem “A Poison Tree” is found in the Songs of Experience and it delves into the mind of man tainted with sin and corruption that comes with experience. In a simple and creative style, the religious theology of the Fall of Man is brought to life. The poem tells the story of how man fell from a state of innocence to impurity, focusing on the harmful repercussions of suppressed anger. Blake utilities many literary devices to successfully characterizes anger as an antagonist with taunting power.

The poem “A Poison Tree” by William Blake discusses human nature’s true form. Someone who is furious with a friend would obviously want to mend the friendship, so they let their anger simmer. However, someone who is upset with an enemy has no reason to tell him or herself to not be mad because all they are to you is an enemy. Therefore, your hatred eventually takes over and you do something dreadful. This literary composition shows the readers how anger can take a toll in two different directions. The poet writes with such ease, that it makes us readers believe he’s gone through it already.

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.