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.

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

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

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.

Death is a topic that unites all of humanity. While it can be uncomfortable to think about, confronting death in unavoidable. “Dying” addresses that discomfort and universal unwillingness to consider the inevitability of death. Pinsky’s use of imagery, symbolism, and tone create a poetic experience that is like death, something every reader can relate to. In “Dying,” Pinsky describes how people are oblivious and almost uncaring when it comes to the thought of death. Pinsky is trying to convince the reader that they shouldn’t ignore the concept of death because life is shorter than it seems.

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.

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

"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”)

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

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.

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

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?

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.

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.

Alliteration is used quite often in the poem. Throughout the whole poem, there is a frequent repetition of “b” words, such as “big dark blobs burned”. In the readers mind, this creates a more powerful image of the berries, and gives a strong impression of their shape