Plog: Blackberry-Picking

In Blackberry-Picking, Seamus Heaney describes, with a whistful tone, his memories of picking blackberries in late summer, presumably in his youth. He uses an array of pastoral imagery with strong sensory connotations to communicate longingly his memories of that time. The poem is written in two stanzas, the first of which has a tone of fondness and longing for a time long gone. The second, which is much shorter than the first, brings a pang of regret and almost bitterness into the tone, as Heaney describes the yearly crop of blackberries going bad. "It wasn't fair", he writes, "That all the lovely canfuls smelt of rot". "Each year I hoped they'd keep, knew they would not". This demonstrates his sadness at this yearly occurence. He has the same hope every year, but every year the berries still rot. This seems to imply Heaney's childlike innocence and idealism in the context of the poem.
The description in the first stanza of the berries themselves demonstrates Heaney's sensual connection to them; indeed it as almost visceral: "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 a lust for/Picking". This passage, especially the word 'lust', communicates Heaney's relationship and associated feelings with the berries. Here he focuses on one very simple thing, eating and picking blackberries, and transforms it into a world of sense experience in itself.