The narrator starts by directly indicating the setting of the poem.
In a rural area, a young child blackberry-picks in “late August” , the season of the ripening of blackberries due to ‘heavy rain and sun’. Heaney mentions colours like green, red, and purple to depict the different stages of blackberry ripening. Discarding the green and red blackberries that are still “hard as knot” and not ready to be eaten, the narrator pours his love and attention to the “glossy” purple clot’ which he personifies and describes as being sweet “flesh”. Words like “flesh, “blood”, and “ glossy purple clot” all describe the fine textures of the fully ripened blackberries with the description of the narrator’s sight and touch.
These berries leave “stains upon the tongue” when eaten, and this tempts the narrator to eat more. “Milk-cans, pea-tins, jam-pots” all serve as tools to hold the blackberries. Blackberry-picking continues in “hayfields, cornfields, and potato-drills” until “the cans are full, until the tinkling bottom had been covered with green ones”. The top of these metal cans are filled with big dark blobs burned like a plate of eyes”. Here, alliteration is used to emphasize the superiority of the purple blackberries to the unripe ones.
The tone of the poem changes to a negative one with the mentioning of “Bluebeard” at the end of the last stanza. “Bluebeard” refers to a fairytale figure with a blue beard who kills all his wives. By referring to “Bluebeard”, the narrator may have wanted to compare his blue-stained hands to that of Bluebeard’s with a negative attitude.
The narrator and his companion(s) “hoarded the fresh berries in the byre” but failed to do so later on when these blackberries started to get moldy and stink with “a rat-grey fungus, glutted on the cache”. By stating there is ‘fur’ in the rotting berries, the narrator suggests that berries live as humans and animals do. Wine is mentioned again by describing the rotting berries as the process of fermentation which results in the sour smell of the originally “sweet flesh”. Lines 22 and 23 use all five senses: sight, smell, touch hearing, and, taste. At this stage, the narrator openly laments because of “all the lovely canfuls smelt of rot”. In the last line, the narrator is bitter and blames himself for not thinking better and hoping “each year” the berries won’t spoil.
The poem suggests that pleasures in life are temporary, and this idea is less taken into consideration by young individuals which result in dramatic disappointments during their youth. Thus, as “sweet flesh turns sour”, childlike hope may turn into sour disappointment, and a positive childhood memory may change into a negative one over time.
