1880), via Wikimedia Commons.“Blackberry-Picking” is a poetic piece that tells a story about picking blackberries in the summer as a child.

Image: William Mason Brown, Peaches on a White Plate (c. He is the author of, among others, The Secret Library: A Book-Lovers’ Journey Through Curiosities of History and The Great War, The Waste Land and the Modernist Long Poem. The author of this article, Dr Oliver Tearle, is a literary critic and lecturer in English at Loughborough University. Alternatively, check out these classic wine poems, these poems about drinking, these great food poems, and these non-cheesy wedding poetry recommendations. The beauty of the poem is in its touching simplicity, and the faint hint of the absurd suggested by that huge orange which the poem’s speaker consumes.įor more classic poetry, we recommend The Oxford Book of English Verse – perhaps the best poetry anthology on the market. This poem is about how the simple day-to-day things – such as buying an orange and sharing it with work colleagues, or walking in the park – can make us happy when we’re in love, and are ‘glad we exist’. A poem at once about the remembered experience of picking blackberries every August and, on another level, about the loss of childhood innocence and the onset of adulthood (with all of the harsh realities and disappointments adulthood brings with it), ‘Blackberry-Picking’ remains one of Heaney’s most popular poems. ‘Figs’ begins with a detailed description of how to eat a fig, before going on to sing the praises of this fruit that ‘doesn’t keep’. Is just to put your mouth to the crack, and take out the flesh in one bite.Īs well as penning novels such as Sons and Lovers, The Rainbow, and Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Lawrence was also a prolific poet. The opening of this poem sounds almost like an advertisement for the fruit marketing board… But some critics have drawn parallels between Laura’s addiction to the exotic fruit in the poem and the experience of drug addiction, specifically opium. The fruit in this classic 1862 poem has been interpreted in various ways: critics have long seen the eroticised description of the exotic fruit as symbolic of (sexual) temptation, with the poem’s protagonist Laura as the fallen woman who succumbs to masculine wiles and is ruined as a result (though she is, of course, happily married at the end of the poem).

Blackberry picking poem