Blackberry Picking

Late August, given heavy rain and sun
For a full week, the blackberries would ripen.
At first, just one, a glossy purple clot
Among others, red, green, hard as a knot.
You ate that first one and its flesh was sweet
Like thickened wine: summer's blood was in it
Leaving stains upon the tongue and lust for
Picking. Then red ones inked up and that hunger
Sent us out with milk cans, pea tins, jam-pots
Where briars scratched and wet grass bleached our boots.
Round hayfields, cornfields and potato-drills
We trekked and picked until the cans were full,
Until the tinkling bottom had been covered
With green ones, and on top big dark blobs burned
Like a plate of eyes. Our hands were peppered
With thorn pricks, our palms sticky as Bluebeard's.

We hoarded the fresh berries in the byre.
But when the bath was filled we found a fur,
A rat-grey fungus, glutting on our cache.
The juice was stinking too. Once off the bush
The fruit fermented, the sweet flesh would turn sour.
I always felt like crying. It wasn't fair
That all the lovely canfuls smelt of rot.
Each year I hoped they'd keep, knew they would not.

 

    In Seamus Heaney's "Blackberry Picking" through use of imagery and diction both positive and negative appeals to the readers senses, he also uses color to assist in his description. His poem becomes an extended metaphor for other experiences as he uses an experience that starts out positive and ends in a way that is inevitable, and negative.

    In the first stanza Heaney chooses his words carefully as he works to use the best words to describe this experience of a young child in a way that is innocent and eventful. Heaney uses words such as "glossy" as he mentions various different colors of blackberries. They are all ripe "like thickened wine" and held "summers blood" within. Even through his use of innocent imagery there is a sense of pain or uneasiness in the first stanza that he creates through metaphors like "plate of eyes", suggesting the poem is not all happy.

    The second stanza takes away the innocence of the experience as the blackberries begin, to the authors displeasing, to rot. Once again Heaney uses imagery to appeal to the reader's senses, however this time in a negative sense. The blackberry juice is now "stinking" as the reader is led into descriptions of "rat-grey fungus". Heaney states that the sweet flesh of the blackberries is now sour. He expresses his unhappiness, creating an emotional ending to the poem that started out positive with little foreshadowing of a maybe not so perfect ending.

    In the end all of this diction and mixture of positive and negative description create a poem that could be seen as a metaphor for many different things. The author starts out happy and innocent in his blackberry picking as if nothing could make him happier. But in the end the experience comes to a rotten end, there is a loss of innocence as he is forced to see his perfect blackberries in a way that he wishes he never had to, but he finds out that it is inevitable, and whether he liked it or not these sweet treats would turn sour.