Seamus Heaney’s poem, Blackberry Picking, is a poem that describes, in great detail, the picking of blackberries. Picking blackberries is, in it’s self, a metaphor of life in two different ways: that to get the good things in life one must suffer, or, it could just be a metaphor for what life in general.

Heaney fills his poem with imagery of blood, death, and evil. In line 6 the juice is described as “summers blood” that once you have eaten leaves a lust for picking. Later on the blackberries are described as eyes that have been placed on a plate, an image that is linked very strongly with torture and death. Throughout the entire poem the thorns of the plant are scratching and pricking, as if they are attacking the pickers. The last stanza is the most grim, the stored berries are rotting and have fungus on them. The once sweet juice now smells like rot, and the berries are grey and fuzzy. Every year, once the berries are cut from their life source, they ferment and die.

  Blackberry bushes are notorious for their thorns, chiggers, and for the fact that they are a favorite gathering spot for snakes. These are all things that one must face in order to get to the good stuff, the berry. This is a lot like life, in order succeed you must suffer. If you run track and want to win the race, you must be willing to run until you fall down, then get back up and keep going, only then can you succeed in your goal. When you are picking blackberries things like the thorns will try to get you to stop picking, but you have to keep trekking.

The poem could also be a metaphor for the way humans live life. Like the berry, when conditions are right a human in born, we grow and mature. Then, like the pickers, we hoard what we get in life, achievements, failures, and memories are as numerous as the berries in the cans. In the end we are consumed with the past and we ferment and die.