"I Hoped They'd Keep"
             "Blackberry Picking" By Seamus Heaney
             Growing up is inevitable and there is nothing anybody can do about it. In "Blackberry Picking" by Seamus Heaney, the speaker is reliving a moment in "late August" when "the blackberries would ripen" and he would pick and eat it all. However, there are so many that his "cache" of blackberries would rot and he could not eat them all and must throw them away. Through the speaker's uses of diction, imagery and metaphor, he expresses how he feels when picking and eating the berries and afterward how he feels when the berries rot away. His disappointment of not being able to do anything about the berries rotten away parallels his own childhood. He wishes the berries would remain strong at its youth and remain unchanged like his own childhood: however, the berries will rot and disappear but he still "hoped they'd keep, knew they would not."
             The first stanza of the poem portrays the speaker in his youth blissfully picking and flavoring the blackberries. He is in his own world only thinking about the "sweet" berries. The berries can be seen as his youth. His intoxication with the berries is "like thickened wine." As soon as he ate that first one "summer's blood was in it leaving stains upon the tongue and lust for picking." The berries are addictive and leave him wanting more. The stain from the "blood" shows the impact the berries leaves on him. Usually a bloodstain is very hard to get rid of just like the feeling when the speaker eats the berry. It leaves a "stain" on his mind that he cannot get rid of. The ideas of picking and tasting the sweet "flesh" of the berries are ingrained in his head. "Flesh," "summer's blood," and "dark blobs burned," are words fill...