Blackberry-Picking

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.

This poem, set in the rural outdoors reminded me of spending time in the fields or on the mountainsides picking berries, and I was attracted to the feeling of never wanting those moments to end.

This poem is written in iambic pentameter, for example the first line could be broken up as “late aug|ust, giv|en heav|y rain| and sun”. The rhyme of this poem is set up as AABBCC etc. throughout the poem. In line 3, the author says, “a glossy purple clot” instead of stating it is a ripened berry and in line 8, “Then red ones inked up”. Heaney uses diction to portray the excitement, through the use of clear imagery. Throughout his poem, the imagery, describes the innocence of the child and his naivety to the world around him. Through further research, I also learned that “Bluebeard” mentioned in line 16 is a French folktale, a story in which the character murders many of his wives. This is an example of allusion, with the reference “our palms sticky as Bluebeard’s.”

 

Casualty

I

He would drink by himself
And raise a weathered thumb
Towards the high shelf,
Calling another rum
And blackcurrant, without
Having to raise his voice,
Or order a quick stout
By a lifting of the eyes
And a discreet dumb-show
Of pulling off the top;
At closing time would go
In waders and peaked cap
Into the showery dark,
A dole-kept breadwinner
But a natural for work.
I loved his whole manner,
Sure-footed but too sly,
His deadpan sidling tact,
His fisherman's quick eye
And turned observant back.

Incomprehensible
To him, my other life.
Sometimes on the high stool,
Too busy with his knife
At a tobacco plug
And not meeting my eye,
In the pause after a slug
He mentioned poetry.
We would be on our own
And, always politic
And shy of condescension,
I would manage by some trick
To switch the talk to eels
Or lore of the horse and cart
Or the Provisionals.

But my tentative art
His turned back watches too:
He was blown to bits
Out drinking in a curfew
Others obeyed, three nights
After they shot dead
The thirteen men in Derry.
PARAS THIRTEEN, the walls said,
BOGSIDE NIL. That Wednesday
Everyone held
His breath and trembled.

II

It was a day of cold
Raw silence, wind-blown
Surplice and soutane:
Rained-on, flower-laden
Coffin after coffin
Seemed to float from the door
Of the packed cathedral
Like blossoms on slow water.
The common funeral
Unrolled its swaddling band,
Lapping, tightening
Till we were braced and bound
Like brothers in a ring.

But he would not be held
At home by his own crowd
Whatever threats were phoned,
Whatever black flags waved.
I see him as he turned
In that bombed offending place,
Remorse fused with terror
In his still knowable face,
His cornered outfaced stare
Blinding in the flash.

He had gone miles away
For he drank like a fish
Nightly, naturally
Swimming towards the lure
Of warm lit-up places,
The blurred mesh and murmur
Drifting among glasses
In the gregarious smoke.
How culpable was he
That last night when he broke
Our tribe's complicity?
'Now, you're supposed to be
An educated man,'
I hear him say. 'Puzzle me
The right answer to that one.'

III

I missed his funeral,
Those quiet walkers
And sideways talkers
Shoaling out of his lane
To the respectable
Purring of the hearse...
They move in equal pace
With the habitual
Slow consolation
Of a dawdling engine,
The line lifted, hand
Over fist, cold sunshine
On the water, the land
Banked under fog: that morning
I was taken in his boat,
The screw purling, turning
Indolent fathoms white,
I tasted freedom with him.
To get out early, haul
Steadily off the bottom,
Dispraise the catch, and smile
As you find a rhythm
Working you, slow mile by mile,
Into your proper haunt
Somewhere, well out, beyond...

Dawn-sniffing revenant,
Plodder through midnight rain,
Question me again.

This poem seemed to be one of the longest I found by Seamus Heaney. Although styled in a different form, with different stanza lengths, the author continued to use rhyme and to tell a story. The story line of this poem is very interesting, although the thoughts jumped from section to section, I could understand the narrator’s emotion.

Anaphora is used in this poem in lines 16-17 of part II, with the repetition of the word “whatever”, in “Whatever threats were phone || Whatever black flags waved.” Heaney also uses parallelism, throughout this and other poems. An example is line 2 and 3 of part III, with “quiet walkers and sideways talkers.”  This phrase also interests me, because one may expect the adjectives to modifying the opposite nouns. In part II from stanza one to two, the author uses another extended metaphor, “Unrolled its swaddling band, Lapping, tightening Til we were braced and bound Like brothers in a ring. But he would not be held At home by his own crowd.”

 

Twice Shy

Her scarf a la Bardot,
In suede flats for the walk,
She came with me one evening
For air and friendly talk.
We crossed the quiet river,
Took the embankment walk.

Traffic holding its breath,
Sky a tense diaphragm:
Dusk hung like a backcloth
That shook where a swan swam,
Tremulous as a hawk
Hanging deadly, calm.

A vacuum of need
Collapsed each hunting heart
But tremulously we held
As hawk and prey apart,
Preserved classic decorum,
Deployed our talk with art.

Our Juvenilia
Had taught us both to wait,
Not to publish feeling
And regret it all too late -
Mushroom loves already
Had puffed and burst in hate.

So, chary and excited,
As a thrush linked on a hawk,
We thrilled to the March twilight
With nervous childish talk:
Still waters running deep
Along the embankment walk. 

This poem grabbed my attention initially as I was confused as to what connotation the title may have. The description throughout the beginning of the poem, leaving the reader questioning what may happen. A large portion of the poem is spent setting up the scene, which in turn correlates to the actions between the two individuals in the poem. Although there is no final outcome of the actions, I enjoyed the rhyming the author employed.

Alliteration with the use of repeating s sound in  “shook where a swan swam” in line 10.

Uses personification in line 7 with “traffic holding its breath”, and “sky a tense diaphragm” (8).  The poem is a sestet, with six lines in each stanza, and the 2^nd, 4^th, and 6^th line in each stanza rhyme. The author also repeats the end of the first stanza in the last sstanza, with “took the embankment walk” (6) and “along the embankment walk” (30).

 

Follower

My father worked with a horse-plough,
His shoulders globed like a full sail strung
Between the shafts and the furrow.
The horse strained at his clicking tongue.

An expert. He would set the wing
And fit the bright steel-pointed sock.
The sod rolled over without breaking.
At the headrig, with a single pluck

Of reins, the sweating team turned round
And back into the land. His eye
Narrowed and angled at the ground,
Mapping the furrow exactly.

I stumbled in his hob-nailed wake,
Fell sometimes on the polished sod;
Sometimes he rode me on his back
Dipping and rising to his plod.

I wanted to grow up and plough,
To close one eye, stiffen my arm.
All I ever did was follow
In his broad shadow round the farm.

I was a nuisance, tripping, falling,
Yapping always. But today
It is my father who keeps stumbling
Behind me, and will not go away. 

When first reading this poem, I was attracted by the rhyme scheme, and the poem’s set up. Similar to “Digging” this poem describes the work of his father, and how he had trouble following the same path. He once struggled behind his father both in the field and in other aspects, but now his father is having a hard time keeping up. This poem has many references to the sea with the use of “full sail strung” (2) and “hob-nailed wake” (13) among others.

This poem consists of six quatrains, each line with eight to nine syllables. Within the poem, the second and fourth line of each stanza rhyme, as well as the slight rhyme of lines one and three, depending on the pronunciation. In stanza three, Heaney rhymes “round” and “ground” in lines 1 and 3, and in stanza four “sod” and “plod” in the 2^nd and 4^th lines.  In the last stanza, the author continues the metaphor that runs throughout the poem, as his father is now “stumbling behind [him}” (23) in a figurative manner. This is instead of the years when the narrator had “stumbled in his [father’s] hob-nailed wake” (13) while growing up and wanting to join him in the field. “Follower” uses a great deal of imagery to leave the reader with a sense of the scene in mind, in stanza three, I can imagine the “the sweating team turned round and back into the land.” And the narrator’s “eye narrowed and angled at the ground, mapping the furrow exactly” (9-12).

Digging

Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pin rest; snug as a gun.

Under my window, a clean rasping sound
When the spade sinks into gravelly ground:
My father, digging. I look down

Till his straining rump among the flowerbeds
Bends low, comes up twenty years away
Stooping in rhythm through potato drills
Where he was digging.

The coarse boot nestled on the lug, the shaft
Against the inside knee was levered firmly.
He rooted out tall tops, buried the bright edge deep
To scatter new potatoes that we picked,
Loving their cool hardness in our hands.

By God, the old man could handle a spade.
Just like his old man.

My grandfather cut more turf in a day
Than any other man on Toner's bog.
Once I carried him milk in a bottle
Corked sloppily with paper. He straightened up
To drink it, then fell to right away
Nicking and slicing neatly, heaving sods
Over his shoulder, going down and down
For the good turf. Digging.

The cold smell of potato mould, the squelch and slap
Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge
Through living roots awaken in my head.
But I've no spade to follow men like them.

Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests.
I'll dig with it.

I was first attracted to this poem because of the title, I was interested in what way the author would describe “digging”. I found this poem interesting because the author uses figurative language to describe how he is the third generation to “dig”. His grandfather dug turf, his father dug up potatoes, and now he is learning to dig in another sense. He is writing his story, bringing back his past.

In his writing, Seamus Heaney uses many literary devices including enjambments on many occasions, where one line of poetry flows into the next without the use of a period, carrying on the meaning. Examples of this are seen in lines 1-2, 3-4, 6-9. In one instance he has one stanza flowing into the next very effectively to tie his thoughts together.

This is a narrative poem that tells a story as the poem progresses, and uses the first person seen with the use of “my”. He tells the story of his father and grandfather and how it lead him to respecting his elders but following their footsteps in another way.

Uses a simile in line 2 to express the similarity of how he holds his pen, to the position a gun would take.

This poem does not have a designated form or rhyme scheme so it is classified as open form. He has stanzas that range in length from two to eight lines.

Biography

Seamus Heaney, born in April 1939, in Ireland, is the oldest of nine children. His father owned and ran a small farm and was committed to cattle-dealing. His mother worked “in service” to a mill owner’s family. The connection to cattle-herding and the industrial revolution was significant in his upbringing, so was he mother’s outspoken style compared to his father’s quietness. While growing up, he witnessed American soldiers preparing for invasion, leaving him between “history and ignorance” and leading to his poetic development. At age 12, he won a scholarship to attend St. Columb’s College in Derry, forty miles from his home. A move he described as the “removal from ‘the earth of farm and labour to the heaven of education.’” He then attended Queen’s University where he progressed as a poet. Later he transferred to Belfast where he lived from 1957 to 1972, working as a teacher and publishing his first poems.  The society he was born into was one divided by religious and political philosophies. Following this period he moved to the Irish Republic. While working as a poet, he met his future wife Marie Devlin, who would later give birth to three of his children and as act as characters in his poems. Since 1982 he has periodically taught in America, and taught at Harvard University from 1985 to 2006. He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1995 and has been awarded the Whitbread prize twice.

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/seamus-heaney

http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1995/heaney-bio.html

To read his poems: http://famouspoetsandpoems.com/poets/seamus_heaney/poems

I was first inspired to study the work of Seamus Heaney after reading his poem “Mid-Term Break” in class, which I found to be incredibly sad. After researching more about Mr. Heaney I discovered that this poem was of an autobiographical nature, based on the death of his younger brother at the age of four. After learning this I was surprised he could be so restrained in his writing of this topic even though he experienced the incident first hand. During my research of Seamus Heaney, I began to feel connected and a great respect for his writing.