April Kolbush Kolbush 1 Professor Robert P. Arthur English 112 29 October, 2010 A Reflection on “Blackberry Eating” by Galway Kinnell A smoothie of the poet’s appetite for words and the blackberries themselves are depicted in the poem “Blackberry Eating” by Galway Kinnell. The poet wallows in the beauty of language and indulgences. He is as attracted to the ripe, dark richness of the blackberries as he is to words. A unique language is developed in the poem as it progresses through the fourteen lines of imagery. You can see how the Kinnell likes to play with words because the use of alliteration.
From there, the speaker compares the sweet flesh of the first blackberry to thickened wine and summer’s blood. In summer you feel alive and blood always rushes. Seamus Heaney uses deadly sin imagery to describe the taste for the blackberries. He speaks of lust to describe his extreme wanting for the blackberries. In the first stanza, the speaker describes the picking of the blackberries by using injury and suffering imagery.
The sight and taste of the blackberries is incredibly intense; Heaney uses strong, descriptive words to convey the berries as they would appear in nature. The first blackberry that ripens is ‘a glossy purple clot’, the blackberry sounds sticky and rich, leaving the narrator anticipated as he eagerly waits for more to ripen. The taste of the blackberries, ‘like thickened wine:’ is a strong, intense flavour, then ‘summer’s blood’ and ‘flesh’ give the impression that the blackberry is something else entirely. ‘Where briars scratched and wet grass bleached our boot.’ Gives the image of darkened shoes, sodden and covered in grass as they reached above the thorns, allowing the reader to clearly imagine the scene. The group of people who are collecting the blackberries are almost in a frenzied rush; as if they didn’t care if they got scratched and wet, they just wanted the blackberries.
The majority of the poem is made up of half rhymes, where the consonants are similar however the vowels are not. Only one couplet rhymes perfectly in the first stanza and it is the one that introduces the first taste of the. This couplet is found on lines 3-4 and state “At first, just one, a glossy purple clot/ Among others, red, green, hard as a knot.” The decision to exactly rhyme these two words invites the reader to compare them, comparing the hard and unripend berries to the soft and ripened berries. The only other full rhyme is found on lines 23-24, “That all the lovely canfuls smelt of rot. /Each year I hoped they'd keep, knew they would not.” This rhyme is when Heaney becomes cynical of the berries and learns that all things must die.
Succulent: (adjective) full of juice; highly enjoyable. He took a bite into the succulent pear. 44. Mimed: (noun) people and events were mimicked and burlesqued; the representation of an action, character, mood, etc. by copying it.
Hughes uses this term to relate how a deferred dream can have a growing painful effect on the persons mind and soul by eating away at them causing misery, And how the irritation of losing hope and motivation can be just as daunting as a physical sore. Hughes next expresses “does
Gatorade showed negative results across the chart. As you will see we didn’t include sugar in this chart, which Gatorade tested extremely high in, as well as our other macromolecules. Unknown A, B, C, D are milk, tomato juice, ensure, and Gatorade respectively. As you can see from this chart, we tested sugars. Milk showed a moderate to high result in sugars, as for tomato juice showed a relatively low result for sugars.
Fruits and vegetables have lesser amounts of fructose that most bodies can handle well. With added sugars in the modern diet, it brings about more harmful effects to the body. It is also known as the fruit sugar and it is a monosaccharide. Fructose is very similar to glucose. Fructose is the sweetest of all nutritive sweeteners.
The image of rotting along with the sense of released odour permeating far and wide symbolises the infectious mass of sin. There is a suggested transformation of a normal human turning into a disgusting, purposeless pulp which could symbolise the effect of sin on the human soul, overcoming it with corruption. The use of the word “rotting” itself creates the sense of corruption and adding
This seemingly innocent childhood pastime is tainted by dark desire and lust for these blackberries. Heaney symbolizes these blackberries as the object of human desire, whatever it may be. The speaker talks about her excitement to pick these berries, describing the desire humans have for these objects of affection. The poem makes a gradual decline into lust, showing its ultimate control over the speaker and then ending with the berries being unsatisfying and inedible, leaving the speaker wanting more. Through diction, Heaney is successfully able to convey to the reader how far this desire goes.