Reality: Merciless Destroyer of Sweet Hope

Children have their own ‘childhood balloons’. As they enjoy their gleeful time as a child, they inflate their balloons with sweet childhood dreams, wishes, and hope. But unfortunately, their balloons won’t persist forever: in fact, it won’t even last for 20 years. At that day, when they grow up to be a true ‘adult’, the brutal sharpness of reality will soon rip their balloons apart. Seamus Heaney’s “Blackberry-Picking” conveys this message of ‘finitude of childhood pleasantness’ through the contrasting mood, emotions, metaphors, and scene depictions of the two stanzas.

The countering characteristics of childhood and adulthood is represented through ‘blackberries’: once charming, covered with pleasant glosses, but soon decaying, covered with revolting fungus. The alternation of the mood and emotions from the first (childhood) to the second stanza (adulthood) shows the ideality of childhood being altered by the grim reality of adulthood.

The first stanza is coated with assorted feelings of ‘pleasantness’. The “glossy (3)”, “knot-like hard (4)” blackberries tasted as “thickened wine (6)”, gorgeous enough to satisfy the speaker at his very first try. Lured by their charms, the speaker filled the can with blackberries, “until the tinkling bottom had been covered (13)”; he was filled with eagerness to keep the wonderful pieces of summer in his “milk cans, pea tins, and jam-pots (9)”. The speaker’s attraction to blackberries deepens so far as to make him endure temporary unpleasantness: “scratches of the briars (10)” and the “bleaching of the wet grass (10)”.

However, the speaker’s temporary feeling of ‘pleasantness’ and ‘fruitfulness’ is soon altered with ‘disappointment’ from the second stanza. The glossy, knot-like hard, and wine-like sweet blackberries could no longer be found in the byre. Instead, all he could find are blackberries whose “sweet flesh would turn sour (21)”, covered with “rat-grey fungus (19)” and “stinky juice (20)”. This moment implicitly delivers the theme of the poem. The charming blackberries, although the speaker expects and ascertains them to, can’t persist their charms forever. Even the ‘pleasantness of childhood’, or, in extension, certain memorable period of one’s life can’t break this rule. Regardless of one’s desire to keep and preserve a pleasant slice of time (especially the memorable moments of childhood) in his can, reality will always, without exception, spoil that plan.

Going through temporary states of ‘fruitfulness’ and ‘despair’, the speaker now reaches the state of ‘realization.’ Albeit knowing the process to be painful and brutal, the speaker realizes that “once off the bush … the sweet flesh would turn sour (21)”; he realizes that decay and despair is destined to arrive once harvest and pleasantness is experienced. Furthermore, the speaker learns his ‘helplessness’ when he “hoped they’d keep, but at the same time knew they would not (24)”; he deepens his realization of the reality so far as to understand that his ‘hope’ can no longer alter or influence the ‘rule.’ Then does Heaney want us to feel helpless as an inferior being to an unchangeable rule of nature? Does he want us to feel trapped in temporary despair, like the moment the speaker found his rotten blackberries?