Blackberry- picking by Seamus Heaney
Set in a very hot and humid weather, the ‘Blackberry-picking”, written by the poet Seamus Heany, describes the ripening of blackberries and the harvesting of the blackberries. This is lyrical poem, illustrating the poet’s emotions. The central mood and atmosphere is contrasted between the first and the second stanza. Numerous language features, including metaphor and simile, were employed by Heany to convey the themes in the poem.
The first line of the stanza describes the setting. The poem must be set somewhere in the Northern Hemisphere. This is due to the fact that in the Southern Hemisphere, ‘late August’ is winter and is far from “heavy rain and sun”. From the first line, the readers can presume that the poem is set in a humid and hot summer. The following three lines portray the process of the ripening of the blackberries. In the description, the poet employs a variety of language features to enable the readers to visualize certain images-chromic imagery, simile and metaphor. The ‘purple clot’ and ‘red, green, hard as a knot’ both contains chromic imagery. They also contain simile and metaphor as blackberries are compared to other things; a ‘clot’ and ‘knot’. These language features were used to contrast the two states of blackberries and also the process of ripening and maturity. The next three lines provide the inner reactions of the pickers to the taste of blackberries. “You ate the first one and its flesh was sweet like thickened wine” Flesh refers to the blackberries and this is an implied metaphor of blackberries as meat. Simile is also used in this phrase as the poet compared blackberries to thickened wine. The next line suggests that the taste of blackberries created ‘lust for picking’. The rest of the first stanza illustrates the process of harvest, therefore, the picking of the blackberries. To pick the berries, the character had to go through many obstacles. Their equipments were ‘milk cans, pea tins, jam port’ and they had to go through physical challenges – ‘briars scratched and wet grass bleached our boots. The setting is more precisely given, “round hayfields, cornfields and potato drills”. The last three lines describe the achievements and its consequences. The characters were able to fill the whole cans and bottles. The bottom was covered in ‘green ones’ and the in the top ‘big dark blobs burned like a plate of eyes’. This phrase contains alliteration, imagery, and simile. The succession of ‘b’ contributes to a certain rhythm and enables the poem to flow easily. ‘Burned like a plate of eyes’ is a very strong simile and provides images that contrasts the “thickened wine” This acts as a foreshadowing of the following incidents that will occur as eyes symbolize a sort of realization and understanding. The persona’s hands were ‘peppered with thorn pricks’ and their ‘palms sticky as Bluebeard’s” These are the consequences of ‘lust for picking’.
