A Disaster Waiting
My small boat goes East with the wind
The ship ploughs South with the sea,
neither aware that the sudden end
 will be the sad death of me

 The crew of the ship lets down its sail,
My boat turns North with a gale.
The Allmo crew their duty they forgo
Their lives they are debating
They do not care or they do not know
Of the disaster that is waiting.

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.

Intoduction to Poetry by Billy Collins

Introduction to Poetry

Billy Collins

I ask them to take a poem
and hold it up to the light
like a color slide
 or press an ear against its hive.
 I say drop a mouse into a poem
and watch him probe his way out,
 or walk inside the poem's room
and feel the walls for a light switch.
I want them to waterski
across the surface of a poem
waving at the author's name on the shore.
But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it.
They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means.

 Colllins has a metaphor in almost every stanza in this poem.
First, what is a metaphor? A metaphor is a figure of speech in which a word or phrase is applied to another object or action to which it i not literally applicable. The first metaphor is found in the second stanza "or press an ear against its hive" I am not quite sure but I think that the hive is a bee hive, which constantly have a buzzing sound coming from them. In the next stanza Collins asks us to drop a mouse into the poem. The stereotypical mouse finds and eats every last crumb of food in the house. Collins is saying be like the mouse milk the poem for everything that it is worth. We are then water-skiing over the top of the poem, gliding over it with ease. Collins then turns to what we as students do to a poem, we tie it up, torture it, and beat it till it gives us what we want.

What is Poetry?

To me poetry is the written form of the emotion felt in a particular point in time, something not easily explained. The lyrics to Gilbert and Sullivan's song Hail Poetry, in their play Pirated of Penzance gave me a new oultook on poetry.

Hail, Poetry, thou heav'n-born maid!
               Thou gildest e'en the pirate's trade.
          Hail, flowing fount of sentiment!
               All hail, all hail, divine emollient!
When I heard this song I realized that poetry was emotion, up to that point I never really understood what poetry really was. When I approached a poem using this view point i was able to understand more about the poem than I ever had before.