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Blackberry Picking
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Symbols & Motifs
Blackberries
This poem shows the blackberries across an entire lifecycle. This cycle is, on one level, a metaphor for the speaker’s childhood, from its inception to its final decay. At the opening of the poem, the berries were “red, green, hard as a knot” (Line 4), with only one hopeful fruit among them. The speaker describes tasting this first berry, inciting his appetite for life. Slowly the others “inked up” (Line 8), and life became his for the taking. Here there is rich, sensual language like “thickened wine” (Line 6), “stains upon the tongue” (Line 7), and “lust for / Picking” (Lines 7-8); this further positions the berries as a metaphor for youth, sensuality, sexuality, and desire. This is nature at its most vital, and it becomes a symbol for the stage of life that is at its most vital, too.
After the poem’s major turning point, the speaker recounts hoarding the berries in the barn until they begin to decay. This moment teaches that vitality, whether in nature or in humanity, is fleeting. The speaker attempted to go against natural order by trying to hold onto something that is ephemeral. This suggests the natural human inclination to try to hold onto fading youth, attempting to hold time itself in place. The rot of the entire cache suggests that by trying to hold onto youth, one risks missing the joy of it while it’s happening. Therefore, the rotting blackberries convey the importance of embracing the present moment and all it has to offer.
By the end of the poem, the speaker admits that every year, he recognized the futility of his hopes. However, he continued clinging to the berries as one clings to childhood, or as an older person clings to the vibrance of their youth.
Blood
Blood is mentioned directly in the poem once—“summer’s blood was in it” (Line 6)—but alluded to on several other occasions. Early in the poem, the first ripe blackberry is referred to as “a glossy purple clot” (Line 3), which brings to mind clotted blood of the body. It presents an image of “summer’s blood” congealing in one concentrated place, as though pulling life from the rest of the plant. This moment also evokes the Eucharist, a religious ceremony that involves the ritual imbibing of wine as a metaphor for the blood of Christ (and in Roman Catholicism, the author’s childhood tradition, the wine is believed not only to symbolize the blood but to actually become the blood). This idea of “bleeding” is powerful because the poem, as a memory, takes place in late August to early September, just as summer was ending. This was not life blood or coming-of-age blood, but a wound that signaled the end of a season. The speaker knew that these berries were a sign of summer dying.
The poem later revisits the image of blood when the speaker says, “Our hands were peppered / With thorn pricks” (Lines 15-16). One can imagine the speaker and his friends shedding tiny drops of blood in exchange for the blackberries. This suggests a small sacrifice to the land in exchange for their harvest, a motif not uncommon in Irish literature. The line then shifts very slightly into another iteration of the blood motif: “our palms sticky as Bluebeard’s” (Line 16). This is a fairy tale allusion to the villain who murders one wife after another, drenching his hands in their blood.
These two related images convey a very subtle but important shift in the energy of the poem: In the first image, the speaker’s blood was given in exchange for the harvest; in the second, the blood was that of summer and the blackberries, taken by force in a display of power.
The Byre
After the speaker and his friends plundered the blackberries, they would store them in the byre, a barn designed predominantly for holding cows. The image of the byre is what leads into the second stanza. Here the poem turns from the outside world—“Round hayfields, cornfields and potato-drills” (Line 11)—to an indoor, more domestic setting. A byre is a manmade structure, illustrating the human effort to work against the land instead of with it. This new setting is the site of the major conflict of the story. Upon “hoard[ing] the fresh berries” (Line 17), the speaker and his friends would lose everything they worked for.
The byre marks the place where the friends’ adventurous spirit matured into something more entrepreneurial. Although the poem’s overall setting is quite rural, here the reader is reminded that humans are the only species drawn to such mass production. This shift from the wild outside world to a more protected one, and from a foraging adventure to calculated storage, parallels the speaker’s arc as he left childhood and became part of the wider world.
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