How does Seamus Heaney use imagery in "Blackberry-Picking"?

Imagery involves references in a text to any or all of the five senses to create a memorable impression. In his poem “Blackberry-Picking,” Seamus Heaney uses imagery extensively. The speaker presents people, especially children, involved in picking berries. While all the senses are referenced, the poem emphasizes the visual, tactile, and gustatory aspects of berry-picking. The colors and textures of the growing berries are presented as indications of the state of ripeness. Once the berries are deemed ripe, the effect on the pickers is shown through reference to the taste in their mouths. Heaney combines imagery with other literary devices such as similes, which in turn evoke bodily and sensory elements.

Unripe berries are described as “red, green, hard as a knot.” The newly ripened “glossy purple” berry is described using a simile as tasting “sweet / Like thickened wine.” A simile is a comparison of unlike things for effect using “like” or “as.” The speaker then uses a metaphor and personification, saying that “summer’s blood” was in that first berry. A metaphor is a direct comparison of unlike things for effect, and personification is the attribution of human qualities to nonhuman things, animals, or abstract concepts.

The description that follows includes tactile dimensions, such as the briars scratching the pickers whose “hands were peppered / With thorn pricks.” Using another simile that evokes the sense of vision, the speaker says that in the top of the container, “big dark blobs burned / Like a plate of eyes.”

The only auditory impression refers to the sound of the berries hitting the “tinkling bottom” of the can. The sense of smell is used only in a negative sense for describing the odor of the rotten berries.

The juice was stinking too. …

all the lovely canfuls smelt of rot.

What literary devices are used in Seamus Heaney's "Blackberry-Picking"?

One literary device in Seamus Heaney's poem “Blackberry-Picking” is imagery. In each of the two stanzas, Heaney provides vivid pictures of the blackberries. In the third line, Heaney describes the blackberries as a “glossy purple clot.” In the next line, he says they’re “red, green, hard as a knot.” The detailed presentation of the blackberries could help one acquire an acute sense of the fruit's texture, look, and feel. Through the nuanced imagery, one might feel as if they’re handling the blackberries themselves.

Some of the imagery contains other literary devices. Go back to the “hard as a knot” image. This image is produced via simile. Heaney uses the simile literary device to compare the blackberries to something else—a knot. Such associations could help one look at the blackberries in new and imaginative ways. In the sixth line of the poem, Heaney uses a simile to link the blackberries to “thickened wine.” In the penultimate line of the first stanza, Heaney likens the blackberries to a somewhat macabre “plate of eyes.”

A third literary device used in the poem is alliteration. At select points in the poem, Heaney strings together words that start with the same letter. For example, in the fourteenth line of the poem, Heaney notes how the “big dark blobs burned.” The proximity of the three b words results in alliteration and brings a melodic quality to the poem.