AP+poetry+photostory+09+winner

Ryan Repoff

Blackberry-Picking by Seamus Heaney

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“Blackberry-picking” by Seamus Heaney is about a person that gathers blackberries in hope to eat them now and eat them later in the winter when the blackberry bush does not bloom. There are many examples in the text that support the idea that the underlying meaning of the poem is good things never last. In the first stanza of the poem, you feel delighted that the person in the poem picks and eats the blackberries. Phrases such as “thickened wine,” “summer’s blood,” and “lust for picking” exemplify that the blackberries were scrumptious and that the person had to go and collect all them and try to savor their flavor. “Summer’s blood” shows that the berries would only last during the summer. It is a stated face that blood does not last long being outside of the body. Therefore, the berries are similar because they will not last long after summer passes. A line later, the author uses the word “lust” to describe the feelings of the person picking. Simply by using the word “lust,” it shows that there is a deep love and passion for the need to pick and save the berries because of their wonderful taste. The transition of the poem comes from the last two lines of the first stanza when it mentions the phrase “our palms sticky as Bluebeard’s.” Bluebeard is an allusion for a type of man who marries women and then later ends up killing them. This is relative to the good things becoming bad because once you pick the berries from the source, they will no longer survive. It is our fault that the berries will not survive and we will not get to enjoy the berries later on, only now. This fervent tone in the first stanza quickly changes to a lugubrious tone in the second stanza. The author uses opposites from the first stanza to show how something so good can deteriorate. In stanza one, the author uses “thickened wine” and “flesh was sweet” to show that it was great in the beginning. In the second stanza, he uses the opposites such as “fermented” and “sweet flesh would turn sour.” The use of “fermented” shows that the berries once were sweet, but now they are sour and undesirable to eat. Again, “sweet flesh would turn sour” also shows the breaking down of the once loved berry becomes dejected because of the mold. A final note to mention, in the title, the author does not disconnect blackberry and picking to keep the poem like the meaning, have it living, beautiful, and fresh instead of dead and ugly. “Blackberry-picking” by Seamus Heaney is about how people try to save the moment and relive it over and over, but eventually it will get old and lose its meaning.

In my photostory, I took the literal meaning of the poem and took the pictures accordingly. I followed through the whole plot of the poem and took pictures by what the words meant. For example, when the poem said “leaving stains upon the tongue and lust for picking,” I took a picture of my tongue that was tainted a purplish to black color from actually eating a blackberry. Again, when the author wrote “Round hayfields, cornfields, and potato-drills We trekked and picked until the cans were filled,” I chose to take a picture of me walking on a trail with a field next to me with the full buckets in my hands. In general, the pictures that I took for the project dealt with the exact meaning of the poem. The music that I chose for my poem are “Oh, it is Love” by Hellogoodbye and “Should have Known Better” by Cinder Road. I chose “Oh it is Love” to set the tone for the first stanza because the first stanza has more of a fervent and loving tone by the way that they described how wonderful the berries and picking them were. The song has a similar connotation to it because of its beats and lyrics that it has. Overall, the song just made me feel good, just as the first stanza did. I used “Should have Known Better” for the second stanza because it has a similar tone as the second stanza, a lugubrious tone. The words in the poem and title are “should have known better,” and this relates how the picker of the blackberries feels after finding the moldy berries. The picker should have known that the berries would rot, but he just hoped that they wouldn’t because they were so good in the beginning. Overall, my music choice and picture choice stick with the plot of the poem.