Summary Of Blackberry Eating By Galway Kinnell

Few things are as enchanting as late summer, when the days are long and warm and berries grow ripe. Blackberries are the subject of poet Galway Kinnell’s poem Blackberry Eating, in which he discusses the richness of blackberries and uses them to describe his fondness of words. He gives meaning to his own words through the use of musical devices including imagery, repetition, connotation, and syntax.

Throughout Kinnell’s poem, the speaker makes extensive use of imagery. He relates to the reader the joy he draws from picking “fat, overripe, icy, black” berries, using visual imagery to paint a vivid picture in the reader’s mind of the berries he picks. These berries, he states, are “prickly,” tactile imagery which should send images of the sharp thorns of a blackberry bush racing through the reader’s mind. The speaker then makes a dramatic shift off course, however, and begins a lengthy description of what he refers to as “peculiar” words. He continues, however, to describe them using imagery more suited to blackberries. These

Throughout the poem, the speaker also uses repetition, both of words and of sounds. “Blackberries for breakfast” he states, bring him great joy, and the alliteration in the phrase causes it to stick in readers’ minds. He even repeats himself in the first line of his poem – “I love to go out in late September” – and the conclusion – “eating in late September.” Repetition of the word “black,” however, has an even more conspicuous effect – “black art,” “black language,” “black blackberries” – and this repetition combined with the connotation of the word “black” drives home Kinnell’s theme: that words are not only “strengths,” they are also forbidden. Like “black blackberries,” language “falls almost unbidden to my tongue,” suggesting that in some way the language the speaker dreams of is both alluring and confusing, and that the speaker is still learning to use