Discuss how Seamus Heaney presents the theme of Nature in the poem ‘Blackberry-

Picking’.

‘Blackberry-Picking’ explores our changing perception of Nature in adulthood, dealing with

themes of nostalgia, disappointment, and possibly even religion. It is written in iambic
pentameter, but breaks in the form of caesurae help to create emphasis; and, in conjunction
with the poet’s employment of alliteration and sensuous language (as in the gustatory ‘leaving
stains upon the tongue,’ in ‘tinkling bottom,’ or in ‘the juice...stinking,’ for example), the poem
feels labial to read. The poem is split into two short stanzas, the first emotively letting the reader
into the world of the child blackberry picker, the second concerned with the calamity of things
inevitably going sour.
The first line of the poem introduces the idea of things requiring work to be acquired:
‘rain and sun’; almost monastic. We are quickly led into the nostalgia Heaney clearly feels about
those first few blackberries each year, which leave a ‘lust for / picking,’ and he sentimentally
recalls the ‘scratches’ they received, and, coming back, their hands ‘peppered / with thorn
pricks’. The working-class symbols of ‘milk-cans, pea-tins, jam-pots,’ tripled, show the suffering
required for such luxuries. But there is something greater within this verse; there is a sense of
divine Creation. The various instances of blood imagery: in ‘clot’; the allusion to the folk-tale of
Bluebeard; in ‘inked up’; but most importantly the simile, alluringly underscored by the break in
meter, ‘like thickened wine: summer’s blood was in it’. This seems to be a reference to
Eucharist, arguably just as much a part of the Irish landscape as blackberries are. There is a
sense that there is something of Jesus’ blood in Nature, and this sentiment of religious
significance seems reinforced by the plosive alliteration towards the end of the stanza, almost
like the sound of the fire of the holy spirit burning within the soil.
The second, shorter, stanza deals with the cruelty of cyclical Nature; what one month is
glorious, the next, sour. In line eighteen the blackberry-pickers find ‘a fur’, and this is where
things go downhill - in adulthood, when we reach the age of eighteen. Through the repetition of
the fricative ‘f’ we feel an indignation, almost an allusion to the ‘f-word’. Heaney presents his
helplessness at the hands of Nature through the deviation in meter implemented here in
particular. There are two full-stops levied here, and too many or too few syllables; Nature is
imperfect. In a child’s eyes, she is cruel. After all, she is supposed to be “Mother” Nature -
nurturing. Here, Heaney could be making a point about the “nature” of God: everything has the
ability to be sinful, and it is only through Him, through death, that one can be emancipated from
Earthly suffering.
‘Blackberry-Picking’ was published in the collection Death of a Naturalist, and I think a
similar message is conveyed here as in the title poem, but it is not necessarily a pessimistic
composition: each year the speaker ‘hoped they’d keep’. Nor is it a sudden revelation; he
‘always felt like crying’. Heaney presents Nature as schizoid, as having a motherly love for Man,
but also a Godly wrath.