the reminscance of a past memory

Why hello again, the crazy Packer fan here back and ready to keep on writing. At this point in class, we have finished A Tale of Two Cities, read a decent amount in Victor Hugo's Notre Dame de Paris, and read a few poems by the famous Seamus Heaney. Not going to lie, I wish I could do all of my remaining blogs on A Tale of Two Cities, but I thought that would be a little extravagant so I decided to do a close reading on one of the poems that we had to read for class, "Blackberry-Picking." Now, yes, we did discuss this poem in class but I just felt that there were parts to the poem that could have been more thoroughly explained or parts that were not brought up at all in the discussion. First off we only discussed desire to be the main theme in the poem, when we should have gone much further in depth. I cannot argue that desire is in fact an important part of this poem, there are lines throughout the poem demonstrating this truth, however desire is but the leading factor to the reoccurring theme that is portrayed in many of Heaney's poems; older adults reminiscing about their past.

"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."

Usually, when someone feels such a strong desire, they can almost feel it or taste it on their lips, the desire almost becomes potent such as the thickened wine. Heaney is looking back at this memory of blackberry picking and he can, even though this is probably a childhood memory can recall the potency of his desire, the way he felt when he first bit into that blackberry. There are different stages and memories of his desire too.


"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"

Heaney is describing the desire and disappointment of a young child. Children are innocent and feel that once they have something beautiful they can't lose it, or they wish not to think about losing it.
So in the end, Heaney as a child was devastated time after time because of his naïve, childish hopes. Now, being older and with aged years of experience, he still looks back at his younger self and reminisces about his hope, excitement and disappointment that he had felt at this age, he reminisces the loss of his childish desires and innocence. Its almost like he desires even with his knowledge to feel similar to the way he did as a child.