Blackberry Picking

The poem is a childhood memory recounted by an adult speaker; the adult, in the present, recalls the child of his past. This creates an immediate tonal complexity as the maturity of adult consciousness gives a sophisticated description of not only childhood naiveté but also the loss of that naiveté. Because the adult speaker details his childhood ingenuity, the voice presents both melancholy and irony. It is the voice of experience documenting inexperience.

The poem, as a recollection, opens with its distinctive setting. The speaker establishes the time of year—late summer turning to autumn—and the tempestuous weather. An artful enjambment takes this description into the second line, which reveals the true opening of the story: the beginning of blackberry-picking season. The line “At first, just one” (Line 3) works like the opening notes of a symphony; here the reader sees the season beginning to unfold.

Heaney uses descriptive language and imagery, detailing the colors and textures of the early unripe berries. This level of detail creates a strong juxtaposition with the poem’s first turning point: the very first ripe blackberry. The speaker reflects, “You ate that first one and its flesh was sweet” (Line 5), a restrained sensuality that suggests a period of patience and delayed pleasure that led to this moment. Here the poem’s vivid descriptions become more intense and intimate, playing with the ideas of “blood” (Line 6), “flesh” (Line 5), and “wine” (Line 6). Although this is only a small moment in time, it is given a fullness that allows the reader to live in it completely.

After chronicling that first blackberry being devoured, the poem’s pacing speeds up considerably. This momentum occurs in both prosody and narrative—in the brisk tempo of the choppy, monosyllabic words (“milk cans, pea tins, jam-pots” [Line 9]) as well as the sense of days or even weeks passing very quickly. The speaker describes covering the bottom of the bucket with firm, unripe berries to keep the fragile ripe ones from bruising. Here the contrast in color and texture harkens back to the poem’s opening, but it has lost its sensuality and taken on a more disconcerting tone: “on top big dark blobs burned / Like a plate of eyes” (Lines 14-15). The next line brings the poem’s second major turning point. The young speaker gave blood in exchange for the bounty of the land and took blood in return. The first stanza ends in a much darker and foreboding place than where it began.

In the second stanza, the story takes on an industrial quality; the speaker and his friends would gather blackberries and store them in the barn. The word choice “hoarded” (Line 17) is powerful because it goes against the concept initially presented in the poem: to enjoy the exciting, once-a-year harvest that nature offers and to indulge in its hedonic joys. Here the children found their efforts quickly thwarted: “A rat-grey fungus, glutting on our cache” (Line 19). While the idea of “glutting” somewhat inverts the earlier “hoarding” (the latter reserves, and the former devours), both actions were choices made to the extreme; both parsimony and reckless abandon neglected the berries’ real value.

As the speaker recounts the berries deteriorating, sensuality once again creeps into the poem; here, however, it has been turned inside out. Instead of being something pleasurable, savorable, like a life at its prime, the berries become a symbol of degradation and decay. This offers a metaphor for the cycle of the human body, the cycle of youth and experience, of embracing the moment before the passage of time strips it away. The speaker expresses his disappointment at the loss, as well as his growing awareness of the natural cycle of the world.

The final line, the poem’s final turning point, brings the reader from the past to the present and shows how the speaker, as an adult, has finally come to an acceptance of the things he cannot change: “Each year I hoped they’d keep, knew they would not” (Line 24). This recognition evinces the speaker’s transition from childhood into adulthood, which is its own experience of loss and deterioration of the spirit.