Episode #044 Blackberry-Picking - Seamus Heaney

Connor and Jack go on a mid-summer romp in the blackberry patch for a discussion of Seamus Heaney's "Blackberry-Picking." Along the way they discuss the poem's accessibility to a variety of audiences, Heaney's ability to create sonically perfect moments, and the meaning of the word "crepuscular." They also take time to marvel at Heaney's overall mastery of all things poetic and the way he uses all of the tools in his poet's toolbox to make the poem both more complex and more easily understandable.

More on Seamus Heaney, here: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/seamus-heaney

More on Heaney's relationship to the Troubles, here: https://trinity.duke.edu/node/1637

The poem of Heaney's passed around online on the 20th Anniversary of the signing of the Good Friday accords, here: https://www.irishcentral.com/culture/good-friday-agreement-anniversary-seamus-heaney

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Blackberry-Picking

By: Seamus Heaney

for Philip Hobsbaum

Late August, given heavy rain and sun

For a full week, the blackberries would ripen.

At first, just one, a glossy purple clot

Among others, red, green, hard as a knot.

You ate that first one and its flesh was sweet

Like thickened wine: summer's blood was in it

Leaving stains upon the tongue and lust for

Picking. Then red ones inked up and that hunger

Sent us out with milk cans, pea tins, jam-pots

Where briars scratched and wet grass bleached our boots.

Round hayfields, cornfields and potato-drills

We trekked and picked until the cans were full,

Until the tinkling bottom had been covered

With green ones, and on top big dark blobs burned

Like a plate of eyes. Our hands were peppered

With thorn pricks, our palms sticky as Bluebeard's.

We hoarded the fresh berries in the byre.

But when the bath was filled we found a fur,

A rat-grey fungus, glutting on our cache.

The juice was stinking too. Once off the bush

The fruit fermented, the sweet flesh would turn sour.

I always felt like crying. It wasn't fair

That all the lovely canfuls smelt of rot.

Each year I hoped they'd keep, knew they would not.