16 pages • 32 minutes read
Blackberry Picking
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Themes
The Awareness and Acceptance of Mortality
One of the most poignant lessons of “Blackberry Picking” involves the awareness of mortality, or the natural cycle of life and death. As a child, the speaker was inclined to think his world would last forever; while growth is an accepted part of life, degeneration is not.
The blackberries themselves are shown in their complete lifecycle, moving from “red, green, hard as a knot” (Line 4) to “sweet / Like thickened wine” (Lines 5-6) and “big dark blobs” (Line 14). This moment presents the berries at their prime. However, the following stanza shows the beginning of decay: “Once off the bush / The fruit fermented, the sweet flesh would turn sour” (Lines 20-21). This process of breaking down began immediately after picking, much like the body enters its state of inevitable mortality immediately after emerging from the womb. And yet, one cannot fully appreciate the blackberries until they pick and taste them; likewise, one cannot truly appreciate life without the mortality that comes with it.
Toward the ending, the speaker recalls his childhood reckoning: “I always felt like crying. It wasn’t fair” (Line 22). This keyword “always” shows that this encounter with decay wasn’t his first such experience, and each time brought the same disappointment. The pivotal final line shows that the speaker, now an adult, has since come to an understanding of what it is to be alive.
Avarice as a Self-Defeating Disruption to the Natural Order
Human beings are the only creatures with the inclination to hoard more than they will ever use. This appears often in contemporary society as people work to earn more money than they really need, or buy clothes they may never wear, or stock up on toilet-paper rolls during a pandemic just to make themselves feel safer. By doing so, people often create an illusion of control over their lives and, in some cases, the world around them.
This is what happens in “Blackberry Picking” when the speaker recounts how he and his friends gathered more fruit than they were able to eat before it deteriorated. By gathering all the berries they could, they put themselves in a position of power over the land. However, these actions were likely damaging to the ecosystem, stripping away food that wildlife relied on to survive and that the plant itself needed for propagation. By giving into their greed, the central figures were disrupting the natural order of their world.
Not only did their actions negatively affect the world around them, they also cheapened what could have been a positive and beautiful experience. By focusing on cultivating their future stores, they missed out on enjoying the bounty of the moment. What could have become a beloved childhood memory turns into a cautionary tale about greed. This is a lesson to find joy in the present moment rather than constantly being distracted by the uncertainty of the future.
Emerging From Childhood
As well as being a metaphor for the lifecycle of the physical body, the deterioration of the blackberries is also an extended metaphor for the decaying simplicity and wonder of childhood. The speaker’s childhood self had no concept of loss or consequence, treating the world as his own kingdom. This sense of power and freedom parallels the vibrancy and intensity of the perfectly ripe berries; in this moment, the speaker was at his happiest and the poem feels most harmonious, because the two central images—the speaker’s youth and the berries’ freshness—are in sync. Only when the speaker remembers the berries’ decay does the poem introduce a feeling of discord and disconnection between the speaker and the fruit, mirroring the feeling of adulthood beginning to encroach upon childhood.
As the speaker discovered the berries rotting in the barn, he came up against perhaps his first experience of mortality. With this realization came a growing awareness of his own body and the life ahead of him. This appears nowhere more clearly than in the final line of the poem: “Each year I hoped they’d keep, knew they would not” (Line 24). Here the speaker describes struggling with the hopes of his childhood, juxtaposed against the inevitable growing knowledge of the harsh realities of the world. It is unclear how many years have passed since this childhood ritual, but the speaker has since gained experience and wisdom at the uncomfortable cost of his childhood innocence.
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