Analysis Of Blackberry Eating By Galway Kinnell

In Galway Kinnell’s “Blackberry Eating,” the author utilizes several literary devices that enhance the symbolic meaning behind the poem. Kinnell uses repeated alliterations throughout the poem through several constant uses of soft sounds that are interrupted quickly by heard sounds to produce pathos for the readers. The slow rhythm of the poem creates a sense within the readers of savoring the blackberries of the poem. The whole poem is an extended metaphor that represents the relationship of tangible blackberries and intangible words. Through sensory imagery, including sight, touch and taste; the author creates a parallel to both the reader’s senses and the word that are contained within the poem. This style that the author has created formulates

a contrast between the blackberries being portrayed as ripe compared to the delight of poems.
“Blackberry Eating” is a short poem that is known to be a free verse with fourteen lines contained within one stanza that includes different segments from the same compound-complex sentence.

The poem relies on the idea of personal experience from the poet, which classifies this poem as a type of lyric poetry. The author starts off the poem with a mood of comfort and love when he reminisces on the topic of autumn, specifically “late September.” Sensory imagery is revealed in the first few lines of the poem when the author says, “among the fat, overripe, icy, black blackberries/to eat blackberries for breakfast.” Along with the imagery, the readers could notice the blending of the wilderness and civilization through the nature of humankind’s necessities when the poet says the “blackberries for breakfast.” Also, in this same line, the author reveals the usage of alliteration with “love, late; black, blackberries; etc. The poem can also be seen as a simile between the comparison of blackberries and words. The words have many letters and contain one syllable compared to the hyperbolic adjectives that are used to emphasize the sensation of the blackberries. The words create a heightening in the meaning as well as relations to the “strengths” and “squinched” of the words among the few vowels of the

blackberries.
The poet changes up the mood of the ripe blackberries after the introduction of the first three lines by contrasting it with the idea that “the stalks very prickly, a penalty/they earn for knowing the black art/of blackberry-making..” The penalty in the poem serves to be a metaphor that describes the pain of the eating as a penalty. He enhances this idea by regarding these blackberries as a form of black art. “Fall almost unbidden to my tongue, as words sometimes do..” This quote is a simile that is an example of the comparison between the blackberries and words that I have stated about earlier. The berries come into the poet’s mouth “unbidden” and uninvited in a way that is easy to manipulate the poet as if he were a machine. Similar to putting blackberries into the mouth, the poet parallels this idea with the thought of creating words of the blackberries that he is eating to recreate “the silent, startled, icy, black language/of blackberry.”
Overall, the poet uses these literary devices to express his love-hate relationship with the literal imagery of eating blackberries and the taking in of words that he uses to write his poems. The poet describes the idea of this art as being difficult yet natural to create words that would, in the end, result as a pleasure. In other words, the poet’s personal experience in this matter is that the blackberry he describes symbolizes the process that he must go through to create the words of an amazing poem that would be enjoyable to the readers, however, there were hardships in order to get it that way. This poem creates the tone of a bitter-sweet ending with its deep meanings through the uses of senses to get the full feel of the poem.