Blackberry Picking — Eduqas GCSE English Literature C720
Eduqas GCSE English Literature · C720
Blackberry Picking
The poems
What you need to know
Children picking blackberries in late summer, hoarding them greedily and finding them rotten, and the speaker's lasting disappointment.
How Heaney's rural childhood in Northern Ireland shapes the poem, and how its sensory imagery, couplets and two-part structure work.
How to use the lesson's key quotations in an essay, with a short worked paragraph.
Key quotations: 'Late August, given heavy rain and sun', 'a glossy purple clot', 'Like thickened wine: summer’s blood was in it', 'Leaving stains upon the tongue and lust for', 'big dark blobs burned / Like a plate of eyes', 'our palms sticky as Bluebeard’s', 'A rat-grey fungus, glutting on our cache', 'the sweet flesh would turn sour', 'I always felt like crying. It wasn’t fair', 'Each year I hoped they’d keep, knew they would not'.
Form: two stanzas, the greedy picking and then the rot; rhyming couplets, many with half-rhymes; sensory, violent imagery of blood, lust and eyes; and the adult looking back at a lesson the child kept learning.
Context: Heaney, born in 1939 on the family farm at Mossbawn in County Londonderry, the eldest of nine children; Death of a Naturalist (1966), his first major collection, about childhood and rural life; the folk tale of Bluebeard, whose locked room held the bodies of his murdered wives.
Compares well with: The Schoolboy on childhood joy that is lost; I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud on nature and memory; Origin Story on things that do not last; Decomposition on decay.
