An interesting image he gives the reader is when he mentions Bluebeard. This is another of his many conections to blood but it is, by far, the strangest. Bluebeard was a pirate who killed many, many people. He was known to have 'sticky fingers'. Heaney links this story in well with the stickiness of blackberries.
The idea I get from this poem is that Heaney is talking about the cycle of life. At frist he talks about the blackberries taking in nutrients of the environment and growing and ripening. at the start of the second verse he mentions 'A rat-grey fungus' and then right at the end he says 'Each year I hoped they'd keep, knew they would not'. This part of the poem is upsetting and he even says he felt like crying. In terms of the life cycle this suggests that everything is nice in the beginning but twhen things begin to get older they become less like what they started out to be and also that time moves on and things arent always going to be around.
In the second poem- 'Death Of A Naturalist'- Heaney uses nature very strongly again. He has set this one right in the heart of nature. You can tell this as you read to the end of his first verse. He mentions things like a pond, blue bottle flies, butterflies and flax, which is uses to make linen.
Heaney uses simple language in his first verse. This gives the reader an impression that it is written from the perspective of a young child who is viewing everything. He alos uses onomatopoeia with words like 'slobber', 'slap' and 'plop'. These all help with the imagery; making the reader feel like he/she is there. Heaney also emphasises the child's perspective in the lines 'Miss Walls would tell us.......and this was the frog spawn'. In these lines there is no punctuation so it seems rushed as if a child is all excited and wants to tell it because it is important.
In the first verse Heaney makes you see what he is writing. He includes things like 'Frog spawn grew like clotted water'. Another simile he uses in this verse is 'Bluebottles wove a strong gauze of sound around the smell' The effect this gives me is that the flies are gathering round a smell and the sound they are making is loud. Normally single flie doesnt make a lot of noise but Heaney shows that a lot of flies makes a strond sound. Again in the second verse he uses similies and metaphors. An example of both would be 'Poised liek mud grenades' as a simile. The image this gives the reader is that the frogs are sitting on lillies, still, like little grenades; and 'Air was thick with a base chorus' as a metaphor. This conveys an image of a big wall of a long, deep sound made by the frogs. The image I get in my head is over a foggy area with a swamp and this very deep sound coming from out of no-where.
The big idea that i get from reading this poem is that there is a movement from the first verse to the second verse that charts the movement from innocence to experiance. it shows that there is a growing-up stage we all go through. it also tells me that life isn't as simple as you may think when you're young. things are always seen differently when you are a child but when u grow up and begin to learn about what you thought were innocent things, you begin to feel life isn't as easy as you had originally thought.