The Sound of Summer
...7). When describing the “green ones” (14) the sound moves to a more cacophonous sound with the consonant ‘b’ because they are “big dark blobs burned” and starting to rot (14). Once the second stanza starts the cacophony is not any more obvious with the hard ‘b,’ ‘d,’ ‘t,’ and ‘c’ sounds because they are mixed in with the euphonious ‘s,’ ‘w,’ and ‘f’ sounds to illustrate the man’s sadness and confusing disappointment that the “fruit fermented” and the “sweet flesh would turn sour” and then all the “canfuls smelt of rot” (21, 21, 23). The onomatopoetic sounds that remind the picker of the berries are the “tinkling”(13) in the bottom of the can and the “glutting” (19) appearance of the mold growing on the berries. These two sounds linger in the picker’s head because he has a visual memory along with the sound to emphasize the impact of the berries. The sound created from the poem also is constructed from the form. The two-stanza poem, scanned as a ten syllable iambic pentameter, has a sixteen-line stanza and an octet that ends with a rhyming couplet. Within these two stanzas, there are several cases for enjambment to portray the outpour of the persona’s emotion toward the reminiscence of the berries. “Late August, given heavy rain and sun/ For a full week, the blackberries would ripen” (1-2). Each line begins with a capital letter even when there is enjambment to show the mixed feelings of the man. Along with the application of consonance, the poem constructs the pattern of imperfect rhyme in the syllables. The imperfect rhyme demonstrates the imperfect qualities of life. The man picking his blackberries is relating his own life to the memory and soon realizes that in life there are going to be the berries that rot, the ones that are bitter from the start, and even ones that are perfect right off the bush but once they sit-they will perish. When the author is trying to get the readers attention for an important line he utilizes formal substitution. Action words are often found in the substitution in this poem because as the picker moves on he reaches new stages of development that the readers need to recognize. The poem begins on a spondaic substitution in “[l]ate August”(1) and as the poem develops into line ten, the picker is feeling much pain “[w]here the briars scratched” near “[r]ound hayfields, cornfields, and potato drills”(11). Lines seven, eight, and nine all have trochee substitutions to portray the action taking place as the man is “[l]eaving”(7) and “[p]icking”(8). After the blackberry picker realizes that the berries are going to rot, the philosophical end comes together with the manipulation of figurative language. The good berry’s “flesh was sweet/ [l]ike thickened wine”(5-6) while the unripe berry’s flesh was “hard as a knot”(4). The similes correlated throughout the poem describe the wild feelings the man has for his berries. The man’s negative feelings come out when he describes the berries looking “[l]ike a plate of eyes”(15). Then he goes on to describe the feeling of being pricked and compares the pricked hand to the hand of a character in a fairy tale that murders his wife. He does this by describing the “palms sticky as Bluebeards”(16) and like “a rat-gray fungus”(19). The similes are not the only figurative language devices that bring the memory to life. The utilization of personification gives life-like characteristics to non-human objects such as summer. The “summer’s blood was in it/ Leaving stains upon the tongue and lust for/ Picking”(6-8). The id...