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.

http://www.poemhunter.com/p/m/poem.asp?poet=6714&poem=31135

The poem that I am going to analyze is a poem in which we can recognize a personal experience of the author. Seamus Heaney always has proved that he always loved his country (Ireland) and his patriotic feeling. His poetry is not an analysis of the situation of Ireland. He often tells personal stories and experiences and his feelings to the Irish. He writes in his way, like he had learnt but he always stresses the idea of the human experience. The culture is very significant in his work (nobelprize, heaney).

Firstly, this poem seems a poem about nature (escape an August’s day to pick blackberries) but this can be allegoric. The author names the poem connecting the two words even if normally it would be “Picking Blackberries”. We can see that the title is only in singular. With this fact the author suggests to us that he only looks for a concrete blackberry, a very special one in which he is very interested.

Another idea in the poem is the innocence of the youth. This poem is similar to another, “Death of the Naturalist” because both poems show experiences of that period of life linking it with nature. Here Heaney describes the days of August in which he picked blackberries.

Two stanzas compose the structure of this poem: the first one describes the picking with so much imagination. In the first verses he is using an optimistic tone to describe the berries. The second one contrasts with it because it is more ironic and realistic.

The rhyme of this poem is not very clear. There are some verses that rhyme but there are others that do not.

In the verses “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” the author gives to the blackberries a sexual connotation. Then, when the fruits turn sour, we can understand that the poet had lost his sexual innocence. He grew up because the time and because he had suffered.

The last verse helps us to understand this loss of innocence. Along the poem we can observe a parallelism between the ripening of the fruit and the maturation of the main character and how he passed from childhood to adulthood.

The red colour can be identified with the blood. The author here could be expressing his feelings caused by the bloody past of Ireland and the hard memory in the Irish people minds (wikipedia, historia de Irlanda). Another way to interpret it is as a sexual metaphor. The process to pick blackberries is comparable to the loss of virginity or innocence of women, and the red colour represents the blood of this change.

The story takes place in summer. This also includes sexual connotations because in summer people wear few of clothes, and you can see often parts of their bodies that can not be showe in the winter. The fact of going to pick fruits could be a metaphor, an excuse for sex, similar to the Spanish expression “llevarse a alguien al huerto”.

This poem is dedicated to another poet: Philip Hosbaum. We don not know if he had any kind of sentimental relation with him, but it is possible that this dedication has had another hidden meaning. This is a way to hide his feelings and to give several interpretations to the poem. It is probably that he decided to hide feelings because he was homosexual, and this is a very good way to create controversy and make people speak about you and your poems.

BIBLIOGRAPHY:

AUTHOR:

- - - - Wikipedia, la enciclopedia libre.

http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seamus_Heaney (16&17 May)

- - - - The Official Web Site of the Nobel Foundation

weboffice@nobel.se

http://nobelprize.org/literature/laureates/1995/heaney-bio.html (16&17 May)

POEM:

- - - - The clocks loneliness.

http://www.erzsebel.com/poetry/ (16&17 May)