Passing In Seamus Heaney's Blackberry-Picking

In the poems “Blackberry-Picking” by Seamus Heaney and “Blackberries for Amelia” by Richard Wilbur both authors center around the idea of Blackberries and what the blackberries symbolize in their lives. In “Blackberry-Picking”, Heaney focuses around the inevitability of time, and how though we may try to hold on to sweet moments of ripe berries, they pass. Wilbur takes a more optimistic viewpoint of life and shows how even though death is near for some, for others life and berry picking is just beginning. In both poems the authors center on the themes of time passing, the appearance of the blackberries and the future. In the two poems the idea of time passing is seen as inevitable, and a thought that both authors accept in their work. Heaney shows in his poem the quick passing of the blackberries being: premature, turning ripe, and in the end fermenting, all in a short 24-line poem. This quick representation of berries birth and death, also symbolizes how the life of a cherished person always passes to quickly and yet there is nothing we can do to stop the passing of people or things we love. The narrator says, “Once off the bush, / the fruit fermented, the sweet flesh would turn sour… Each year I hoped they’d keep, knew that they would not” (19-24), he realizes that as time passes all living things must pass, even if it is very …show more content…
Heaney uses the words “summer’s blood” (6), “sweet flesh” (21), and “plate of eyes” (15) words that are usually not applied to plants, to represent the connotation to human lives passing. The narrator in “Blackberries for Amelia” also accepts the