Seamus Heany's Blackberry Picking

James Baldwin’s short story “Sonny’s Blues” is a timeless piece of literature. In this story, Baldwin captures the reality of drug abuse. He tackles the aspects that accompany it, including the consequences that follow and the impact it has on others. Alongside the underlying themes of this story are memorable characters and an impactive message. “Sonny’s Blues” leads a story that can easily take place in everyday life.

Lee perfectly uses the weight of peaches to illustrate his idea that they subject to the law of gravity that force everything to weighs down. Lee uses peaches to explain his father’s life, labor, love and death. “and his arms grow weak, as he labors under the weight of peaches.” This poem also has a powerful tone of feeling complexity as well as bitter sweetness of nostalgia as he begins with “No easy thing to bear, the weight of sweetness.” The sweetness means a kind of taste or tenderness however he describes it in terms of weight and he generate his powerful idea about emotional complexity.

In “Marigolds” a young girl is growing up during the Great Depression. For Lizabeth, the narrator, everyday is a challenge. As she transitions from an innocent, naive child to an aware, yet unsure young woman, the smooth road she’s been traveling on suddenly becomes bumpy and unfamiliar when a fit of anger taken out on her neighbor marks Lizabeth’s growing up. “All the smoldering emotions of that summer swelled in me and burst- the great need for my mother who was never there, the hopelessness of our poverty and degradation, the bewilderment of being neither child nor woman and yet both at once…”, (Collier, “Marigolds”). All of the emotions that Lizabeth has been holding in spill out of her in an audacious, violent action that will exile her childhood; the destroying of Miss Lottie’s prized marigolds.When Lizabeth realizes with remorse what she’s done, she gains the heavy burden of adulthood. “In that humiliating moment I looked beyond myself and into the depths of another person. This was the beginning of compassion, and one cannot have both compassion and innocence”, (Collier, “Marigolds”). When Lizabeth conveys that Miss Lottie had planted marigolds as a show of passion and hope, she becomes compassionate towards Miss Lottie, ridding her of her childish innocence. While “Hard on the Gas” is minimally worded, the meaning of the poem speaks volumes. The poem conveys growing up, and the fact that the road to adulthood is not, in fact, smooth. “Rush, rest, rush, rest”,

One of the most pervasive themes in this passage is that of a spreading decay that is taking over the society. This is first expressed in quite a literal sense, as an actual decay of fruit and produce, which spreads like a virus across the American countryside and farming lands. Due to the economic mismanagement of the farming industry, fruit and other produce are left to rot and decay on the trees because they are not picked by the farmers. The text gives many examples of different fruits being left to decay on the farms. We see, for example, the cherries, that are described at first as “full and sweet”, being left to turn into seeds which “drop and dry with black shreds hanging from them”. The purple prunes, which now “carpet the

Throughout the poem, a number of literary devices are used. For example: “or press an ear against its hive”. Using this metaphor, Billy Collins is comparing the body of a poem to the hive of a bee. The hive of a bee appears to be something dangerous and unknown, just like a new poem, never before seen, with which one is unfamiliar. Using this metaphor, Billy Collins is

The speaker’s change in attitude and evolvement of emotions depict the enduring effects of prejudice and societal boundaries on the speaker. Unable to rise past the class system, the speaker remains on the outskirts of city limits, picking berries. Losing his enjoyment of picking berries, the speaker comes to a new realization about the cold side of reality, and consequently, when the speaker gives up his child-like view of the world and the sweetness of nature, he receives pain, the stinging thorns of

This strong metaphor compares the narrator to the elephant who feels their fate is death. The third part of line 4 is the fine timbers that directly relate to the house previously mentioned. The purpose of the house fortifies the idea that what’s inside is of value. The house is nothing without its fine timbers and it is merely for protection and shelter. Just like a pregnant woman is for her unborn child. The fifth line represents the rising loaf like a child growing inside a womb. It is a pun on a familiar saying to pregnancy of a bun in the oven. “Money’s new minted in this fat purse” plays with the idea that the purse has no great value in itself but contains valuable things inside. Line 7 explores the narrator’s feelings towards having a child. She feels like “a means”, as if she is just a way for the baby to be born. As a mother she is just “a stage” and a platform but not a performance. She is “a cow in calf,” where many cows are separated from their offspring and have little to do with their mum. The final lines seem to break away from the rest of the poem and have a tone of darkness. After eating “a bag of green apples” one might feel sick especially since green apples are considered sour. The fruit is also unripe, signifying that the narrator is not ready to have a baby. Another point that can be found is that it is easy to see the resemblance of this line and Eve from the Bible. Eve was tempted to eat an apple and was cursed with the

Bruce Dawe uses symbols to create moods showing sadness and the loss of hope. Dawe’s line ‘and when the loaded ute bumps down the drive past the blackberry canes with their last shriveled fruit’, the blackberries were used as an indicator of time, on their arrival the berries were the 'first of the season' but by the time when they drove past the blackberry cane was they're saw only 'their last shrivelled fruit'. This tells us that they perhaps only stayed for about two or three months. ‘The brown kelpie pup will start dashing about, tripping everyone up’ The dog run around barking, shows the scene of a chaotic house, it also conveys a sense of bad luck to the family. A “kelpie” is an Australian sheepdog, in Scottish it refers to an evil water spirit that takes the form of a horse and drowns travellers. This cross-meaning gives the poem a sense of danger, implying that the family is not only traveling with a puppy for the children but is also an omen of bad luck. The unexpectedness of the move is conveyed by the fact that the tomatoes are still green on the vine. They never live in the one place long enough for the tomatoes to ripen. This could be the same for other aspects of their lives, making new friends could be an example. They started to become friendly with 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.

I like persimmons. I like persimmons. I like persimmons. There. I’ve repeated the phrase thrice. Now, if I asked you to identify whether I like persimmons or not, you would, almost certainly, say “yes.” Having the same statement reiterated three times makes one more confident that it’s not only important, but that it’s a fact in this context! In Lucille Clifton’s “white lady,” a tone of desperation is conveyed through repetition of words, phrases, and sentence structures. Moreover, repetition highlights that desperation is unique not only to the loved ones of the cocaine addicts, but to White Lady as well. As an aside before we begin, I will note that tone is a complex element within poetry. Hence, it is often conveyed through a mish-mash of literature devices, such as repetition, line breaks, diction, etc. Therefore, I will not claim that this discussion is a comprehensive one that describes all the myriad ways tone has been emphasized in the poem; I will merely discuss one contributing factor to tone.

These lyrics to the song “Strange Fruit” is very dark and gloomy. Though this was a short song, the lyrics to this song is enough to tell a whole story. When listening to this song, Billie Holiday was singing it with a depressing tone, but at the same time there was a part to her voice that made this song turn more into a “storytelling” of a horrific story. These lyrics tell the story of a “strange fruit”, but it isn’t actually about a fruit that is strange, because it’s about a lynched body of an African American. The reason this body is called a “strange fruit” is because of how deformed the body is after it has been beaten to death and burned, so it is hanging there like a dried and “strange fruit”. That is why these lyrics are important to the song because these lyrics is to tell people how horrifying lynching is but no matter how scary this is people don’t seem to care during the time period that this song describes.

Obviously the author has lived through the depression and was black because one could not write something so accurate in accordance to that time period and have one feel the deep emotional impact of her writings without experiencing it personally.  In the first sentence she writes “…all I seem to remember is dust—the brown, crumbly dust of late summer—arid, sterile dust that gets in to the eyes and makes them water, gets into the throat and between the toes of the bare brown feet.”  In this phrase the words give a harsh, cruel feeling of how the depression was, which could then explain how she remembers the depression and that it was a hard time for her.  Most likely it was a significantly hopeless moment in her life.  In the next paragraph she writes “When the memory of those marigolds flashes across my mind, a strange nostalgia comes with it and remains long after the picture has faded.”  Knowing the marigolds symbolize hope the word “nostalgia” gives a feeling of longing, since the denotative meaning is yearning.  When stating the marigolds give a “strange nostalgia” the author could be thinking how she, sometime in her life, longed to have hope.  She needed to have something to look forward to or just something to look at to give her hope.  Later, towards the end of the story she explains “…Innocence involves an unseeing acceptance of things at face value, an ignorance of the area below the surface.”  The words she uses give a sense of wisdom

The theme exhibits a lot of ignorance since it does not work in the interests of everybody thought, it brings a lot of meaning considering the author’s point of view. The tone bears a significant similarity to that of a teenager who is oblivious to reality. However, the mood is wondrous and happy following that the diction gives a great sense of positivity and success. The poem indicates that life seems to be a bit easy in the childhood provided that the in the childhood one has no responsibilities to worry about unlike in the old age where one has a lot of responsibilities to worry about. For example, in the sentence "cotton candy torches, sweet as furtive kisses" , it rises thoughts of huge cotton candy that tastes wonderful but furnishes as soon as a furtive kiss. The poet has used very descriptive words and numerous poetic devices to make the description in the poem very clear and effective. The tone only changes in the last line “Tossing a glance through the chain link at an improbable world.” In fact, it is the only instance where the author brings reality to light.

The word "remember" in line two may be considered a play on words; re-member, or dismemberment as in the case of an abortion. "Damp small pulps" in line three sounds animalistic, as if Brooks is saying "pups" instead of "pulps." If the word "pulp" was in fact intended, it is then part of the poem's imagery, indicating something that is crushed,

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.