"Blackberry-Picking" by Seamus Heaney is a poem of late summer, the picking of blackberries and the realization that they will rot. The children in the poem long to savor and collect all the blackberries. In the end though, the children are faced with the reality that the berries will always rot. This is a metaphor for expectations and the life cycle.
In the first stanza is the life of the blackberry, birth and rejoicing in eating the ripened fruit. The children enticed by the wild blackberries ripening, consume and hoard them. ".and that hunger Sent us out with milk cans, pea tins, jam pots.Round hayfields, cornfields and potato drills" (line 8/line 9/ line 11). In this stanza there is a repeated imagery of red juice and the marks of berry picking, which creates a special picking atmosphere of rapture. .
The children try to capture the joy of summer and berry picking by saving the blackberries, the essence of the experience. The children store all of their berries in a bath tub, but by the time it is filled to the top the berries are rotting. "I always felt like crying. It wasn't fair" (line 22). Each year they are also filled with disappointment that they could not savor their berry picking for long. Year after year they let themselves become disappointed. Sadly this is the end of summer with the death of the fruit.
With the end of August the children expect the birth of fruit with its sweet nourishing. As always they try to hold on to it. They do this because as children they do not understand death and birth. The birth of the berries they delight in, while the death they try to overcome and when they cannot are saddened. As the berries get older so will the children.
