Here’s a response to
the request for a poem from Seamus Heaney, who died August 30, 2013 and won the
1995 Nobel Prize, among many achievements. I haven't read much Heaney, but I’ve seen
“Blackberry-Picking” before, so maybe it’s one of Heaney’s better-known
works.
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| Sorry, no blackberries today |
My first thought is that the poem is of a kind with Hopkins in its extravagant language and play with sounds. It also reminds me of Frost as it draws on homey, agrarian material. In both the linguistic richness and the emphasis on nature, I also hear echoes of Dylan Thomas. Of course, I don’t mean that Heaney is a plagiarist, but it’s interesting to consider how each of those poets was similar to and different from the other three. Jean Toomer's rich, early 20th Century, Georgia poems in Cane might also fit into the discussion.
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| Cedar Waxwing, Berry Lover |
The main
strength of “Blackberry-Picking” is the way its language sometimes grows as saturated
as the berries, especially in the sounds of words. The following ought to sate
anyone’s need for words made thick and juicy by back vowels and hard consonants:
glossy purple clot
Among others, red, green, hard as a knot.
Among others, red, green, hard as a knot.
Like
thickened wine: summer's blood was in it
on
top big dark blobs burned
Like a plate of eyes. Our hands were peppered
With thorn pricks, our palms sticky
Like a plate of eyes. Our hands were peppered
With thorn pricks, our palms sticky
A
rat-grey fungus, glutting . . .
Go ahead and try to
hurry through “on top big dark blobs burned.” Each syllable is a word, and each
syllable is stressed. The three p sounds, along with b three times (bilabial monosyllables if you really care), the
short o three times, and the guttural
g and k simply cannot be rushed. If we try, we’ll gag. Heaney demands that we wallow in the
juice of the berries, and he follows that with the shocking change in “a plate
of eyes.” I hear fish eyes there, but whatever eyes those are, they undercut the sumptuous sounds that led up to them. Appetite and the fullness of physical beauty have a discomfiting flip side; the berries look back at us as we're about to gorge on them.
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| Cooper's Hawk--Waxwing Eater? |
Several times here
I’ve pushed for the notion that, if a piece of writing is calling itself a
poem, it should offer gifts along the way—images and sounds, pictures, music and ideas, that startle us out of laziness or complacency. These of course might be
pungent or murderous as well as sensuous or gorgeous; but they are not indifferent, casual, generic. The
poet has been moved into writing about something, and he should want his
readers startled into a similar new awareness.
I’m not sure a boy’s
tears about the “unfair” rotting of sensuous blackberries delivers a
mind-altering shock, but it might. It’s an introduction to the death of mortal
beauty. I suspect I’ll never see that fruit again without thinking of this poem
with its clot, knot, summer’s blood, dark blob, plate of eyes, and the killing
fungus that’s not some namby-pamby, boring, non-comittal off-white, mushroom entity; no, it's an
aggressive, hideous, “rat-grey” thing, eating up the beauty of what an Irish
child beheld and loved. 
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