Blackberrying (1961). Content and Description

First published in the posthumous collection Crossing the Water (1971), “Blackberrying” is from what critics call Plath’s “transitional period,” the time between Colossus and the Ariel poems when Plath and Hughes had returned to England and after the birth of their daughter. During this period Plath wrote several landscape poems, including “Stars over the Dordogne,” “Blackberrying,” and “Finisterre.”

With its triple negations, “Blackberrying” opens in a dark alleyway, a void where the blackberries themselves, “Big as the ball of my thumb, and dumb as eyes,” “squander their juices” on the speaker’s fingers, creating a sacramental bond, an unasked-for “blood sisterhood” the speaker assumes is an indication of the love the berries feel for her. Ironically, the first stanza depicts an inhuman world, yet the speaker personifies the blackberries staining her hands, which she collects in a milk bottle. As the speaker stands before this haunting scene, at the end of the alleyway, undulating sea, to which the speaker is mysteriously drawn, awaits. The speaker does not describe the ocean, however, because she cannot see it. Thus, the speaker implies that the sea’s heaving can only be heard.

The second stanza shifts from the view of the path to the sky, where choughs, crowlike birds, fill the space with their cries and spin in the wind. Their voices protest, although the speaker is not clear about the object of their objections. Such ominous images reflect the speaker’s interior world, a dark, paranoid space into which she is increasingly drawn, or “hooked,” as the speaker describes at the end of stanza 2.

As this stanza reveals, the speaker doubts that she will ever reach the sea, perhaps because she is increasingly caught up in the blackberries, especially one bush covered in flies that are stunned, as the speaker is, at the berries’ alluring sweetness, an allure that inspires belief in the unseen, whether it be heaven, as in line 8, or the sea that appears as “a great space / Of white and pewter lights” ringing like a silversmith beating metal at the end of the final stanza. In the final lines of the poem the speaker again peers out into a great nothingness, this time the sea upon which she comes after climbing a steep path with wind “Slapping its phantom laundry” at her. Such an awe-inspiring scene is reminiscent of a romantic vision of the sublime.

Yet, while romantic poets might envision a connection with the divine in such an awesome scene created by the inimitable powers of the natural world, here the speaker stands alone before another void, this one stretching endlessly out before her. Whether this exterior journey mirrors an interior journey that the speaker, and by analogy Plath, is making, the final image, bleak, astounding—a scene of great beauty, unbelievable horror, and overwhelming despair—may represent a vision of the final frontier: the realm of death into which we are all ultimately drawn.

For Discussion or Writing:
1. “Blackberrying” and “Finisterre,” another of Plath’s poems written in September 1961, are both set on the coast and can be compared with Wallace Stevens’s “The Idea of Order at Key West,” which also examines the natural world and comments on the nature of poetic perception, the facility that vies for presence in a world of absence, creating order out of chaos. While for the romantic poets the imagination was the poet’s link with the divine, for Stevens the imagination is the tool we use to create fulfillment in our lives, the sort of order that is both necessary for our survival and a creative power that gives our seemingly purposeless lives meaning. On this level, all three poems may be said to deal with the role of art in our lives. With that in mind, analyze the Plath poems as responses to Stevens, keeping the following questions in mind: What is the relationship between the imagination and reality in art? What does art do for or to its perceiver? Where does art originate?

2. Both Plath’s “Blackberrying” and Galway Kinnell’s “Blackberry Eating” are self-reflexive poems, poems that reflect on the art of poetry and comment on the nature of language. First, compare the two poems and their focus on language/ poetry/the imagination. Then write a well-developed essay that analyzes how the Kinnell poem both relates to and comments upon the Plath poem.

3. Compare “Blackberrying” with earlier Plath landscape poems such as “Point Shirley” and “Water- color of Grantchester Meadows.” What vision of Plath and the world do these poems depict? What notions of the self do the poems present? With your observations in mind, write a well-developed essay that persuades the reader of the significance of Plath’s landscape poems.

4. “The Moon and the Yew Tree” also deals with both the natural world and what may lie beyond. Focusing on both poems’ supernatural and religious imagery, write a well-developed essay on the relationship between religion and the natural world in Plath’s poetry.