seamus heany "i ryme to see myself to set the darkness echoing"
... changed him into what he is now, experiences that are good or bad. The second half of the poem is about the attempt to preserve the berries and how it’s always a failure, no matter how much he hopes he is still always left disappointed when the fungus sets in. in the first section Heaney presents the tasting of the blackberries as a sensual pleasure, he appeals to the senses using imagery, he refers to sweet “flesh”, “summers blood”, “lust”. He uses many adjectives of colour and describes the enthusiasm of the people picking the blackberries using every available container to hold the blackberries. The wonderful taste of the fresh fruit contrasts with what it quickly becomes “fur” and “rat grey fungus”. In the poem we see two different viewpoints, a frustrated child in “I always felt like crying” and “it wasn’t fair”, but you can see an adult view when he says “each year I hoped they’d keep, knew they would not.” The subject of blackberries can be related to other things in that good things can quickly turn bad no matter how muck you don’t want them to. Overall the poem paints a vivid descriptive picture of Heaney’s childhood memory suggesting a loss of childhood innocence. The poem Digging shows how the young Heaney looked up to his elders. The title could mean a variety of things like; digging up the past, memories or manual garden labour. The poem is about how he was expected to carry on the tradition of preserving agricultural traditions and how he watched his father and grandfather “straining” to dig “flowerbeds” but instead of following the traditions he wrote and celebrated them in his poetry. The poem explains how his father would work on the farm with ease when he was younger but as he got older started to struggle, “till his straining rump among the flowerbeds bends low, comes up twenty years away.” The poem is full of admiration of their skill and the hard work that they did. Heaney uses onomatopoeia, alliteration and oxymoron’s to describe the work done on the farm, “squelch and slap”, “cool hardness.” Towards the end of the poem Heaney states, “But I’ve no spade to follow men like them.” This is where he realises his destiny is different he suggests guilt or remorse that he can not follow in the family tradition of farming. He resolves his guilt by vowing to continue the rural traditions of Ireland in his poetry instead. The last stanza is a repetition of the first line “Between my finger and my thumb the squat pen rests. I’ll dig with it.” Heaney is saying that instead of digging with a spade he’ll dig memories with a pen in his poetry. This relates to the quote ‘ I rhyme to see myself, to set the darkness echoing.’ He is saying that instead although he hasn’t followed the tradition he still doesn’t forget where he comes from and his poetry proves that. The poem, “Digging” and “Blackberry Picking” are quite different because although they are both written about his childhood, blackberry picking is more from a child’s point of view in contrast to Digging where he has a very adult opinion of what went on in his childhood and what he though of it. The poem Mid-term break is about the death of Seamus Heaney’s infant brother and how people, including himself, reacted to this. The poem’s title suggests a holiday but this “Break” does not happen for pleasant reasons. For most of the poem Heaney writes of people’s unnatural reactions, but at the end he is able to grieve honestly. The boredom of waiting appears in the counting of bells but “knelling” suggests a funeral bell , rather that a bell for lessons. Heaney uses asson...