Random Poem Analysis

1063 Words5 Pages
Blackberry-Picking: A Poem Analysis Many obstacles manifest themselves during the time of our lives providing us the opportunity to mature and expand our world, but unless they are faced head on these obstacles will reappear in a continuous cycle. In the poem Blackberry-Picking, Seamus Heaney expands on the idea that our personal growth relies on our ability to accept some of life’s ‘truths’ by using various symbols, vivid imagery, and the speaker’s point of view. Although Heaney uses several different symbols the most important ones include the fresh and rotten state of the berries. In line 3, Heaney describes some of the fresh berries as “purple” in color while in line 4 he describes the rest of them as “red” or “green”. These colors symbolically represent the speaker’s youth and inexperience with life at the time of the event. In lines 5 through 8, Heaney uses rich imagery to describe someone, other than our narrator, eating the single mature (or purple) blackberry. On top of this, the narrator describes the berries fresh “flesh” as “sweet/like thickened wine” (line 5-6), which is a drink that requires a certain level of responsibility and maturity. Sense the narrator is not the one eating the “wine tasting” mature berry it can be assumed that he is young and immature like the red and green berries. Our narrator’s youth is confirmed again when he claims that he “always felt like crying [because] It wasn't fair” (line 22) the berries where rotting. Social standards suggest that a mature person has accepted that life is unfair and would just ignore something as trivial as this, while an immature child on the other hand might cry over it. That said, it is the very word “always” in line 22 that implies how the narrator is beginning to mature. Because the narrator knows that the berries will ‘always’ rot every year we can assume he has a basic idea of the cycle
Open Document