Comparing Heaney's Blackberry-Picking And The Barn

A child’s viewpoint portrays their emotional experiences with the situations he or she encounters. Often times, children are innocent and view the world around them naively. At some point, their views tend to shift and a child sees the fear and disappointment in life. Seamus Heaney’s two poems, “Blackberry Picking” and “The Barn,” reflect the different emotions a child endures through his or her perspective towards ordinary objects. In “Blackberry Picking,” a child is hopeful that the blackberries will keep after the harvest, yet ultimately knows the blackberries will soon rot and die. In “The Barn,” a child describes their fears towards aspects in everyday life. Through the use of setting, diction, and form in the two poems, Heaney demonstrates a grim mood through a child’s viewpoint. The environment of a particular setting plays a significant role in affecting a child’s viewpoint. Both poems take place in an outside environment and ultimately involve a cowshed. In “Blackberry Picking,” the speaker is a man pondering at his youth spent in the countryside. The first stanza of the poem takes place during the summertime in “Round hayfields, cornfields, and potato drills” (11). The fields reflect that the speaker is adventurous and free spirited, while picking blackberries

“Blackberry Picking” is constructed of rhymed lines in iambic pentameter. There is two stanzas which are divided in order to reflect the youthfulness and mortality of the blackberries. Also, the two stanzas portray the different moods the speaker endured through a child’s viewpoint. “The Barn” consists of twenty lines divided into five quatrains. Although the poem appears to be organized structurally, there are enjambed lines that portray the confusion and anxiety that the speaker is enduring. As one can see, the two poems differ in their forms, yet still portray a grim mood through a child’s