Poem Analysis: Eulogy For Grandmother

Great pieces of literature allow for someone to relate to the piece. As I read “grandma, we are poets” by Lucille Clifton I could relate. I did not read it as if I related to autism, but as I remember all the words that define who were are by society’s standards. In Clifton’s poem emotion could be felt when portraying those with autism and I was determined to make a similar piece.

"The garden is delightful. The fruit trees and flowering shrubs form a pleasant variety. We have green peas almost fit to eat and as fine lettuce as you ever saw. The mockingbirds surround our evening and morning. The weather is mild and the vegetable world progressing to perfection. We have in the same orchard apples, pears, peaches, apricots, nectarines, plums of various kinds, figs, pomegranate, and oranges. And we have strawberries which measure three inches around." (“Biography Of Nathanael Greene”)

Simple bushes bloomed berries of all sorts, every tree blossomed branches full of fruit, and even the beauteous flowering stalks grew great harvests at their roots.

The setting of Sal’s mom kissing the tree with blackberry stained is a memory important to sal, and one she will always cherish. Sal watched her mom from her room window. Her mom was walking to the barn By the barn was a sugar maple tree. “she plucked a few blackberry’s and popped them into their mouth. She looked all around her—back at the house, across the fields, and up into the canopy of branches overhead.

Burial Rites, a novel written by Hannah Kent is heavily based on story telling and the effect it has. Through the course of the novel, readers observe the significance story telling has for both the individual and the community. For an individual story telling can make the speaker feel empowered whereas for the community story telling’s main significance is the entertainment it provides. Since Kent’s purpose of Burial Rites is to tell the life journey of Agnes Magnusdottir in an ambiguous light, story telling also becomes important for the reader.

The third line states the speaker's purpose. He is going out "to eat the blackberries for breakfast." This line shows that the speaker not only has an attraction to the berries aesthetic qualities but also craves them to satiate his appetite. The speaker's appetite for the berries is later paralleled to his appetite for words. In the next line, the speaker describes the stalks of the blackberry bushes as "very prickly." This is the first negative image used in association with the blackberries. All the previous images have been positive characteristics of blackberries- fat, overripe, icy, and black. Perhaps, this negative image of the prickly stalks is being used to show that along with pleasure invariably comes pain in the natural world. This same idea used in the context of the words suggests the two-fold potential of words to both benefit and harm. In the next line, the prickly stalks are attributed as a penalty that "they [blackberry bushes] earn for knowing the black art." This imagery of the flowering of the bushes being a black art lends a magical, bewitching quality to the blackberries, an idea that there is something wickedly tempting about the berries. In connecting this idea to the "word" metaphor, it shows that the ability to tempt and persuade with words can also be a form of black art. In the next line, the speaker talks about standing among the blackberries and lifting the stalks to his mouth where "the

It takes him a longer time to completely become conscious of his surrounding in the woods and let go of the society he left behind. “He leaves behind his work, his household, his duties, his comforts-even, if he comes alone, his words. He immerses himself in what he is not. It is a kind of death” (723). He must stop depending on society and technology so he can start to pursue his own ambitions as an individual in the woods. The woods bring him a sense of peace and allow him to find who he truly is outside of the fast-paced society.  “The day is clear, and high up on the points and ridges to the west of my camp. I can see the sun shining on the woods. And suddenly I am fully of ambition: I want to get up where the sun is; I want to sit still in the sun up there among the high locks until I can feel its warmth in my bones” (723). Berry needs to find clarity in himself which will allow him to follow his own ambitions and feel whole again in his

Berry's life has been consumed by both poetry and farming. He has written over 30 works of writing, all consisting of trying to convince oblivious people of how bad our American farming is deteriorating, and explaining how harmful most livestock is to humans. He has seen

When hiking out to gather them, Heaney describes how the “briars scratched” (10) their wet boots. In this line, the reader’s mind is brought to a wooded area that seems friendly and hospitable except for the clawing briars and bleaching water. It is unmistakable how tiring the work can be, but the poet never mentions his exhaustion. While it takes a great deal of effort to pick berries, they still seem to be fragile to the point that they are annually torn down by the claws of greed. Also, the poet explains how their “hands were peppered/ with thorn pricks (15-16), as the repeated “p” sound places a dimension of anger and pent-up rage to the poem’s tone. The reader up to be pained by the ruined berries, turned into a fleeting memory from their former grace as they become largely forgotten and wasted if they are not eaten immediately. Similarly, the poet points out that unsuppressed desire can lead to this type of selfishness, and can prove to be dangerous if permitted for a long

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

At first glance this poem seems a happy tale of childhood. These are memories that make the heart smile. Images of heavy summer storms full of rain, alternating with bright, joyous sunshine, full bushels of blackberries waiting to be picked; these are images most can relate with. The reader can taste the bitter-sweetness of the summer’s first blackberry, feel the scratch of briars against their own skin, sense the excitement and butterflies in their own stomachs as they race to gather all the wondrous blackberries they can, followed by the anger and the disappointment when the blackberries rot and ferment before the readers’ eyes. However, if the reader were to take the diction and imagery quite literally, a somewhat different picture is aroused. “…a glossy purple clot…” (line 3) describing the first ripened blackberry, brings to mind the picture of a nasty blood clot in someone’s veins, why would Heaney compare blackberries to blood clots?

As the poem opens it describes several lines to show the industrial advertising movement “Come buy our orchard fruits, come buy, come buy: Apples and quinces, Lemons and oranges, Plump unpeck'd cherries, Melons and raspberries, Bloom-down-cheek'd peaches, Swart-headed mulberries, Wild free-born cranberries, Crab-apples, dewberries, Pine-apples, blackberries, Apricots, strawberries; All ripe together” (Rossetti 321). The fruit would be impossible to all be in season, and yet it is "all ripe together” (Rossetti 321); and with its artificial viability, its relocation from its origin and vibrancy "citrons from the South" (Rossetti 321), its roots are apprehensive and malevolent. The plethora and suspicious purity of the fruit imply the manufactured goods, industrially reproducible; which possesses ideological value of industrialism and

In the poem “After Apple-Picking”, Robert Frost has cleverly disguised many symbols and allusions to enhance the meaning of the poem. One must understand the parallel to understand the central theme of the poem. The apple mentioned in the poem could be connected to the forbidden fruit from the Garden of Eden. It essentially is the beginning of everything earthly and heavenly, therefore repelling death. To understand the complete meaning of Frost’s poem one needs to be aware that for something to be dead, it must have once had life. Life and death are common themes in poetry, but this poem focuses on what is in between, life’s missed experiences and the regret that the speaker is left with.

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.

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.