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Blackberry Picking Essay

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Blackberry Picking

Blackberry picking is about greed, growing up, how we struggle in life and how pleasure can be taken away from us very quickly. Heaney writes retrospectively, about the times he as a child would go blackberry-picking every year, as a metaphor for these experiences.

The first stanza of the poem is mostly quite positive and enthusiastic. The first part of the stanza describes the the ripening of the berries, “given heavy rain and sun for a full week, the blackberries would ripen”. He also gives us an image of the berries.
Heaney uses the metaphor “a glossy purple clot” for the ripe berries, and the similie “hard as a knot” for the unripe berries. When you say
“hard as a knot”, the sound is quite short, …show more content…

This is implying that nature is going against the children and fighting back, using the briars and wet grass to bleach and scratch their boots, as trying to stop the children from raping and pillaging the berries away from it.

The children even took berries that were unripe, “With green ones”.
This heavily suggests greed, as they are even hoarding the berries that aren’t ripe yet. “On top big dark blobs burned like a plate of eyes”, the use of the word “burned” is suggesting pain, torment and hell felt by the berries, also it is as if the berries are accusing the children of murder, watching them like a plate of eyes. You know that the children feel a sense of guilt after picking so many berries, after their hands are full of thorn pricks and stained with berry juice. “palms sticky as Bluebeard’s” – this reference to Bluebeard says that their hands are covered in berry juice, like blood, as
Bluebeard had with the blood of his wives.

The second stanza describes how the berries die and rot, “lovely canfuls smelt of rot”. The “rat-grey fungus” had consumed the berries, and “summer’s blood” had turned into stinking juice. You can feel the disappointment - “I always felt like crying. It wasn’t fair”, you can tell this is the voice of a child. There is also a contrast of a adults view in the last line. “Each year I hoped they’d keep, knew they would not”, this is also ironic,

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