Seamus Heaney’s Blackberry-Picking describes the speaker’s pastoral memories of blackberry-picking, a yearly ritual beginning in the late August. Using a slew of rhetorical devices such as allusion and imagery, Heaney captures the innocence of the speaker’s past self, and innovatively mirror the process of growing up through the duality of two voices throughout the poem. A song of innocence and experience, Heaney presents a third-person perspective on the blossoming of blackberries, before transitioning to the first-person perspective. While the poem is structured as an iambic pentameter with occasional departures, the poem heavily employs slant rhymes and half-rhymes; Heaney captures the innocence of the speaker’s childhood through slant
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The “fresh berries in the byres” the speaker actively searched for became “fermented” and “sour”, evoking the Latin phrase “tempus edax rerum”. Moreover, Heaney plays around the memory of the “glutting’ fungus, disturbingly describing it as a the rotting corpse of a rat. The use of disturbing imagery and the stark contrast between the previous taste and appearance of the raspberries (“its flesh was sweet” versus “the sweet flesh would turn sour” and “The juice was stinking too”) emphasizes the injury to the speaker’s innocence, done by the impermanent quality of the of goods he had sacrificed to earn. The poem undergoes a dramatic shift, now using the pronoun “I” as the speaker describes his yearly feelings of despondency as a child. However, Heaney conveys the true maturity of the speaker in his last line, reciting his former desperation to cling to the hope that “they’d keep”. In brief, Heaney describes the speaker's ritual of hunting for blackberries before met with the disappointment of their impermanence, mirroring the process of growing up. The religious language serves to emphasize the points of his trek, from his ecstasy at the taste of the “glossy purple clots” to the sting of experience; the experiences become elevated, and become saturated with occasional grim imagery, conveying the jaded perspective of the now matured
The “fresh berries in the byres” the speaker actively searched for became “fermented” and “sour”, evoking the Latin phrase “tempus edax rerum”. Moreover, Heaney plays around the memory of the “glutting’ fungus, disturbingly describing it as a the rotting corpse of a rat. The use of disturbing imagery and the stark contrast between the previous taste and appearance of the raspberries (“its flesh was sweet” versus “the sweet flesh would turn sour” and “The juice was stinking too”) emphasizes the injury to the speaker’s innocence, done by the impermanent quality of the of goods he had sacrificed to earn. The poem undergoes a dramatic shift, now using the pronoun “I” as the speaker describes his yearly feelings of despondency as a child. However, Heaney conveys the true maturity of the speaker in his last line, reciting his former desperation to cling to the hope that “they’d keep”. In brief, Heaney describes the speaker's ritual of hunting for blackberries before met with the disappointment of their impermanence, mirroring the process of growing up. The religious language serves to emphasize the points of his trek, from his ecstasy at the taste of the “glossy purple clots” to the sting of experience; the experiences become elevated, and become saturated with occasional grim imagery, conveying the jaded perspective of the now matured