Late Summer Truth

      As summer begins to fall and autumn rises, the sun softens, and the green leaves mutate into brilliant yellows and reds.  Poets have often found this change from summer to autumn an inspiration for a poem.  Of course, the change of season is never really the poem’s subject, but rather a vehicle for the poet to explore the human condition.  In his poem “Blackberry Picking,” Seamus Heaney (1939-2013) recollects scenes from the final days of an August when he and others had picked the ripe blackberries.  But this August which Heaney captures is different from previous summers: it symbolizes the change from childhood to adulthood.

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.

     In the first stanza, the speaker describes in sensuous images the memory of picking blackberries at the end of summer.  Filled with anticipation, he watches the blackberries “ripen” for “a full week” through “heavy rain and sun,” When eating the “first one” it soaks his palate, stains his “tongue,” and arouses his “lust” for “Picking.”  This imagery conveys the physical sense of taste, but “lust,” suggests another meaning in which the vehicle of blackberry picking evokes the tenor (metaphorical meaning) of the stanza: the loss of childhood innocence to the awakening of adulthood.  And like the great poets (e.g., William Blake) before him, Heaney knows that once the fruit of “adult experience” is tasted, there is no way to restore that innocence of childhood.  Life becomes a relentless pursuit to fill “cans” and even though one can succeed in filling those “cans,” the “briars” will scratch and “Our hands” become “peppered/With thorn pricks…”  The stanza ends with the curious phrase, “our palms sticky as Bluebeard’s.”  

     Bluebeard is the French folktale of the wealthy man who married six wives and murdered each one of them.  Looking for a seventh wife, he visits a neighbor and wants to marry one of his daughters.  Bluebeard gives an elaborate banquet and afterwards the neighbor’s youngest daughter agrees to become his seventh wife.  Once back at his castle he tells her he must take a brief journey, so he gives her the keys to all the rooms in the castle.  Before he departs, he tells her she may visit all the rooms but one, which he absolutely forbids her to enter.  A short time after he is gone, she becomes increasingly curious and cannot resist the desire to visit the forbidden room.  She unlocks the door, enters and discovers the bodies of the previous wives hanging on hooks in this underground chamber. Horrified, she drops the key on the blood-soaked floor, picks it up and leaves the room.  When Bluebeard returns, she hands the keys to him, he notices blood on the forbidden room key and realizes she has entered the forbidden room.  He is just about to kill her, when her sisters and their husbands arrive and save her.  

     Now, the question is, “Why does Heaney include this allusion to Bluebeard?  The answer is twofold.  The first lies in the imagery of the second stanza.  Once the children “hoarded” the “fresh berries in the byre” a “fur” or “rat-grey fungus” gluts their “cache.”  This putrefying image accompanied with the stench of fermenting juice defiles the sweet innocence of the image of the unpicked berries.  In a sense, when children pick the fruit, they symbolically murder their own childhood purity analogous to Bluebeard murdering his innocent wives.  A second answer becomes apparent when we consider one of Heaney’s poetic methods.  Although he has written a lyrical poem, Heaney often tells or narrates a brief tale within his verse.  The speaker here is his main character who participates in the poem’s plot and discovers the inescapable truth of our inevitable decay.  But what makes this poem’s little narrative all the more interesting is the final line: “Each year I hoped they’d keep, knew they would not.”  Despite discovering the truth that innocence of youth always lapses into adulthood and decay, Heaney (and we) perennially tell ourselves tales that transform this transitory existence into an imperishable one.

Two by Donne

     When John Donne was young, he wrote some of the most extraordinarily passionate love poems in the English language (1590’s). In his great love poem, “The Canonization” Donne argues with a friend and attempts to rebut the criticisms his companion has made regarding his love affair.

               The Canonization

For God's sake hold your tongue, and let me love.
   Or chide my palsy, or my gout;
My five gray hairs, or ruin'd fortune flout;
   With wealth your state, your mind with arts improve;
      Take you a course, get you a place,
      Observe his honor, or his grace;
And the king's real, or his stamped face
      Contemplate; what you will, approve,
      So you let me love.

Alas, alas, who's injur'd by my love?
   What merchant's ships have my sighs drown'd?
Who says my tears have overflowed his ground?
   When did my colds a forward spring remove?
      When did the hearts which my veins fill
      Add one more to the plaguy bill?
Soldiers find wars, and lawyer find out still
      Litigious men, which quarrel move,
      Though she and I do love.

Call us what you will, we are made such by love;
   Call her one, me another fly,
We're taper too, and at our own cost die,
   And we in us find th'eagle and the dove.
      The phoenix riddle hath more wit
      By us; we two being one are it.
So, to one neutral thing both sexes fit.
      We die and rise the same, and prove
      Mysterious by this love.

We can die by it, if not love by love,
   and if unfit for tombs or hearse
Our legends be, it will be fit for verse;
   And if no piece of chronicle we prove,
      We'll build in sonnets pretty rooms;
      As well a well-wrought urn becomes
The greatest ashes, as half-acre tombs;
      And by these hymns, all shall approve
      Us canonized for love;

And thus invoke us, "You, whom reverend love
   Made one another's hermitage;
You, to whom love was peace, that now is rage,
   Who did the whole world's soul contract, and drove
      Into the glasses of your eyes
      (So made such mirrors, and such spies,
That they did all to you epitomize)
   Countries, towns, courts: beg from above
A pattern of your love.

     This poem can confuse readers because of Donne’s abrupt, argumentative start, abstract references, and intellectual complexity. The poem begins in what appears to be an argument between the speaker and a friend who has questioned the value or legitimacy of his relationship. He snaps at this “listener” and tell him to “shut up" and “let me love,” and wittily directs him to criticize his other faults—his graying hair, his poor financial circumstances. If those ideas won’t have him change the topic, he advises him to find himself a position at court, examine the king’s behavior or just think about anything else.

     If unable to persuade his listener to think about any else but his relationship, he tries to reason with him by asking whom or what his love has “injur’d”? Has his love destroyed commerce, flooded land, delay spring, or increased deaths from plague? As the stanza slides through the last three lines, the speaker concludes that their love affects neither wars nor civil litigation.

     After attempting to distract the listener, the speaker focuses on the power and quality of their love. Their sexual passion is uncontainable (symbolism of “fly”), though perhaps ephemeral (“We’re tapers too”), but they embody also pure masculinity and femininity (“th’eagle and the dove”). Their love fuses a perfect union in which their entire beings, bodies and souls, become one, and furnishes their love with a “Mysterious[ness].

     By the fourth stanza, their love morphs from the carnal to the spiritual. The story of their love may not be epic enough for a great tomb, but their “legend” (word also meant for life of a saint) will do nicely in “sonnets” and “pretty rooms.” Those sonnets become the “hymns” that will confirm the canonization of the love they shared. By this point in the poem, the speaker has left his listener behind, as he envisions future lovers petitioning these canonized saints for a pattern of their love to emulate. Though this is no easy poem to understand at first, after several rereading it should certainly impress if not astonish the reader with the way Donne incorporates such disparate elements and so radically transform the speaker’s tone from the opening aggressive line to the closing serene wording. But does Donne’s argument convince?

     Upon first encountering much of John Donne’s poetry, the reader will see that his poems can be confounding. All those allusions to religion, to the Bible; all the oblique references to mythology, legends, contemporary issues, politics, commerce etc. require much more patience than contemporary reading habits are accustomed to. Even the great 18th century critic Dr. Johnson noted that Donne’s poetry could present difficulty: “The most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together; nature and art are ransacked for illustrations, comparisons, and allusions; their learning instructs, and their subtlety surprises; but the reader commonly thinks his improvement dearly bought, and, though he sometimes admires, is seldom pleased.” Johnson is right that our improvement is “dearly bought” by the labor exerted in understanding Donne’s poetry. But many would not agree with his judgment that readers are “seldom pleased” by reading Donne. Fortunately, not all of Donne’s poems are weighted with “heterogeneous ideas.” For instance, there is the charming “Sweetest love, I do not go”:

Sweetest love, I do not go,
   For weariness of thee,
Nor in hope the world can show
   A fitter love for me;
       But since that I 
Must die at last, 'tis best,
To use myself in jest
      Thus by feign'd deaths to die.

Yesternight the sun went hence,
   And yet is here today;
He hath no desire nor sense,
   Nor half so short a way;
      Then fear not me,
But believe that I shall make
Speedier journeys, since I take
   Moe wings and spurs than he.

Oh how feeble is man's power,
   That if good fortune fall,
Cannot add another hour,
   Nor a lost hour recall.
      But come bad chance,
And we join to it our strength,
And we teach it art and length,
   Itself o'er us to'advance.

When thou sigh'st, thou sigh'st not wind,
   But sigh'st my soul away;
When thou weep'st, unkindly kind,
   My life's blood doth decay.
      It cannot be
That thou lov'st me, as thou say'st,
If in thine my life thou wast,
   Thou art the best of me.


Let not thy divining heart
   Forethink me any ill;
Destiny may take thy part,
   And may thy fears fulfil.
      But think that we 
Are but turn'd aside to sleep;
They who one another keep
   Alive, ne'er parted be.

     In this poem, Donne wants to persuade his wife not to fear for his safe return from the journey he was about to take to France and the Low Countries with his patron Sir Robert Drury. His logic certainly could not convince the modern reader, and perhaps slightly reassured Anne who naturally would have worried given the dangers and difficulties of such a journey. Donne jests that his journey is a sort of rehearsal for the inevitability of death. He observes that the sun makes longer journeys each day, so his will be even “Speedier.” He reminds her not to add to her fear by dwelling on his absence. He urges her not to sigh or weep, since doing so makes him feel his “life’s blood” is being “decay[ed]”. Finally, he even panics a little himself and tells her that her “divining heart” might bring about the very misfortune he is trying to convince her will not occur and that she should think of their coming separation as no different from when they are “turn’d aside to sleep.” Although the couple were “parted” during his journey, Donne did return safely, and he and Anne were reunited.

     These two poems, one complex, one simple offer a glimpse into Donne’s poetry. Many of his other love poems are considerably more difficult and require a strenuous effort on behalf of a reader to attain the pleasure his verse can and does inspire. Fortunately, there are texts available with ample footnotes and helpful introductions to guide readers along on their Donnean journeys.