We read this at school, and at the time I never really appreciated it. Now, 20 years on, it is one of my favourite poems. I can still hear my English teacher's voice as she read it.
Yeah about girls going through puberty and breasts growing. And the guys hitting puberty and wanting girls. And then the childhood innocence always disappearing once youth grows to adolescent years. We all want the youth joy and innocence to last and it never does.
It's the way he reads this, with that beautiful lilt in his voice and the passion for his childhood and blackberry picking. I could listen to this over and over again, soothing, beautiful. I can almost taste that first blackberry.
Such a lovely man, poet his words visual in memories and tears words deep in my heart Bless you, Seamus, for this and especially Clearances and wish I was pulling and folding sheets with my mother
Oh How I would love to talk to this man. The sound of his voice sounds like Sligo. When visiting my Grandmothers house in Mulaghmore and cousins" The Feeney's" I walked a lane with rock walls and tons of beautiful blackberries. Their Grand Mother is buried next to Wm.Butler Yeats in Drumcliff. Alas, at 80 years old no more travel. What a great Poet. yvonne
I had the honour of meeting home. It was in a restaurant in Co. Wicklow where he lived. I was 5 and the waiters and waitresses had planned to give me a cake at the table and sang me happy birthday and he was in the corner and wished me a happy birthday.
Just in from that late august rain and rewarded with a bountiful blackberry harvest. And to complement my spoils of the hedges I had to have Seamus. Go raibh Maith agat.
Derry born (county not the city), and not far from where Heaney was raised. I HATE his slurred QUB/Harvard accent. But I love his poetry. His metre is bang on, and he transports me to magical places.
Seamus heany: WHAT A BRILLIANT POET TO ME HE SHOULD BE THE POET LAUREATE U.K. 🇨🇮🇮🇪🇮🇪🇮🇪🇮🇪🏴🏴🏴 HIS WORKS CAN MAKE YOU LAUGH AND CRY, THINK...??? AND SMILE, ... ALONGSIDE SAMUEL BECKETT ( WAITING FOR GODOT ) THEY GIVE US SOME OF THE BEST WORK'S EVER ...!!! 🍺😁👍🇨🇮🇮🇪🌍🌎🌏🇬🇧🇮🇪🇨🇮🇨🇮
And hopefully someday you'll be grateful to that teacher. This is poetry at its best and most beautiful. It's got the whole package: the imagery, the five senses, and the allegory of life and death.
lm sorry, did I missed something? maybe I did , maybe I'm an old fashioned poetry reader ? Maybe sun rimes better with fun , run , cancun. ....maybe poetry doesn't have to be such a mystery ..... This man made the poetry a complicated mystery that will give you at the end a painful headache. Now , you explain me how a 12 years old student must to remember or analise that poem ( if you can call it poem )
Just passable. It's basically just slightly elegant prose put into lines with a few pretty but unexceptional images. Still a good deal better than his interminable Nobel acceptance speech, though. At least this is concise and has a theme.
Don't worry about it. Sometimes on RU-vid I can be a bit of ass, and it is down to my lack of recognition for my own poetry I sometimes put comments up like these. I do find his work overrated, though.