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.