blackberry picking

name professor class date Greedy Blackberry Pickers The poem Blackberry-Picking, by Seamus Heaney, is about a group of children who become overexcited over picking berries then sobbing after their hard work has rotted away due to the fermentation of the picked berries. Through this ordinary depiction of fruit rotting, the author illustrates the theme of human aging and mortality. The author expresses this theme through a sequence of events, using allusions, similes, and every aspect of imagery. In this poem there was only one primary allusion that contributed to the description of the theme that we all are mortal which is to Bluebeard (line 16). Bluebeard is a mythical fairytale pirate who cold bloodily murdered his wives. The pickers’ palms are explicitly alluded to Bluebeard’s palms when it says that “[their] hands were peppered/ [w]ith thorn pricks, [their] palms sticky as Bluebeards.” From here, using a simple analogy that picker is to blackberry as Bluebeard is to wife, we can infer that the blackberry symbolizes the wife. Thus, it is safe to say that the blackberries are like the wives, just maturing until the fruits are seized by the children and metaphorically killed as the wives are captured and killed literally. This emphasizes the theme of aging and life because unlike the mortal, life is short and like blackberries and wives, nothing lasts forever and eventually perishes. To give hints to the aging process of the blackberries and, metaphorically, humans, Seamus Heaney uses a series of similes to describe them over time. In the beginning, the berries’ “flesh” is described as “sweet like thickened wine…” (lines 5-6). Of course thickened wine isn’t commonly sweet at all but rather bitter making this an excellent example because there is “[a]t first, just one” that was sweet and ripe…” while the others are still ”red, green, [and] hard as a knot ”(lines 3-4). The hard green