Blackberry Picking

In the poem Blackberry Picking Seamus Heaney’s evokes images of sensuous fruit and the pleasurable, ritualistic activity of harvesting them. The poem begins with a straightforward sentence: “Late August, given heavy rain and sun/ For a full week, the blackberries would ripen.” Interestingly, despite his passion for the fruit, it isn’t until line three, when the poet makes the observation, “At first, just one, a glossy purple clot/ Among others, red, green, hard as a knot,” that you get a sense of his experience with blackberries and his excitement as they transform from hard “knots” into sticky “clots.”

By adding these hints Heaney heightens the poem’s tone and imagery. The images capture the experience of eating berries: “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.” Like wine, the fruit is intoxicating and he wants more.

Note how the pronoun shifts in line nine, it changes from the anonymous “you” to the more intimate “us.” This is used to intensify the power of the berries. The children armed with “milk cans, pea tins, jam-pots,” pick until their containers are full and their joy takes on a savage quality. The berries are now “dark blobs” that burn like “a plate of eyes,” and the children’s hands are “peppered/ With thorn pricks, palms sticky as Bluebeard’s.”

In the second stanza there is a shift in tone and the euphoria ends. The poet says they “hoarded the fresh berries in the byre,” note that a “byre” is a shed, but it may have been used as a homonym for “bier,” a support for a coffin to foreshadow the fate of their labours. The innocent “hunger” of the children in stanza one can’t compete with the “rat-grey fungus, glutting on our cache” and the berries start to spoil. Heaney realises that they would have lasted longer on the bush, but like the others he was overwhelmed by desire. In response to losing the berries, he says, “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.” The imagery has changed and it is no longer lush. Note the rhyme, as it is only the second fully rhyming couplet in a poem which has been built on off-rhymes as it connects back to that moment when the first berry ripened and we see the cycle in full. We understand that each summer the poet is seduced by blackberries and that each summer he collects them only to see them spoil. Year after year, hope and desire let him forget the unfairness of time’s passage, yet he must also face the sad knowledge that his harvest cannot be preserved.