Use of Diction, Imagery and Metaphor in Seamus Heaney S Poem, Blackberry-Picking

Use of Diction, Imagery and Metaphor in Seamus Heaney’s Poem, Blackberry-Picking

Seamus Heaney’s poem “Blackberry-Picking” does not merely describe a child’s summer activity of collecting berries for amusement. Rather, it details a stronger motivation, ruled by a more primal urge, guised as a fanciful experience of childhood and its many lessons.

This is shown through Heaney’s use of language in the poem, including vibrant diction, intense imagery and powerful metaphor—an uncommon mix coming from a child’s perspective.

Heaney emphasizes the importance of the experience of Blackberry picking by using diction that relates to sensory imagery and human urges. He describes the flesh of the first berry of summer to be “sweet like a thickened wine” a beverage with a taste that lingers—just as he describes the blackberries to, as they “Leave stains upon the tongue.”

As if the first harkened that the best was yet to come, he jumped at the chance to be drunk on blackberries, for the one taste had left him with a lust and hunger for more. Driven by something deeper than the simple desires of their younger years, they went “out with milk cans, pea tins, jam pots” without a thought to the many dangers, "the briars that scratched and the wet grass that bleached their boots." And they emerged with berries

“burning” in their containers, their palms sticky as with blood with the reference to

Bluebeard when he murdered his wives. Clearly this childhood experience is no a mere description of play. The metaphors and diction, especially those which relates to the sense, show that this experience touched the young Heaney at a different level. In the second and last stanza of the poem we are reminded that he was but a child. The thought of losing the berries “always made him feel like crying” the thought of all that beauty gone so sour in the aftermath of lust. The lack of wisdom in younger years is emphasized by the common childish retort of “It wasn’t fair.” He kept up the childish hope that this time would be different, that this time the berries would keep and that the lust, work, and pain might not have been in vain, that others would not “glut” upon what he desired. But such are the hopes of childhood, naïve and ever optimistic. Perhaps his lesson learned carries outside of childhood as well.

Thomas Hobbes once said that humanity in a natural state is “violent and brutish.”

Heaney’s poem “Blackberry-Picking seems to qualify this argument. The primal urged and sensory imagery emphasize the nature of the motivations for picking blackberries in the summers of his childhood.