Seamus Heaney Blackberry-Picking Analysis

In Seamus Heaney’s oem, “Blackberry-Picking”, Heaney utilizes diction, alliteration,a nd rhyme in order to express his discontent in how fleeting life’s beauty can truly be. Heaney wishes to present this ideas to us as the reader through very callous diction. Every so strongly does the poet juxtapose the “summer’s blood” (7) in his poem to the succulent blackberries, admiring the fruit for its life-giving goodness and necessity in life. Had Heaney chosen weaker diction, one reading this poem would not feel such a strong association with the healing property of these berries. It is clear how Heaney associates blood with the berries, as humans need blood to live, and this will also factor into the latter part of the poet’s prose in which the berries are “slaughtered” for the great desire that humans have of their beauty and taste.
When hiking out to gather the blackberries, Heaney describes how the briars in the woods “bleached [their] boots” (20). In this phrase, our mind is asked to be brought to the scene of a treacherous field, where it is unmistakeable how tiring the work can be. While it takes a great deal of effort, beauty seems to be yet fragile enough to always be torn down by the claws of greed and jealousy in ways unknown until their consequences are known. Also, the poet explains how their “hands were peppered/ With thorn pricks, [their] palms sticky as Bluebeard’s (15-16), as the repeated “p” places dimension of sound into the piece, almost one alike to the sound of a ending in only dismal ways. These lines lead into the conclusion of the poem, as they set the reader up to be pained by the ruined berries, turned into a fleeting memory from their former grace as they become one of a million fermented products in the family’s