Nobody in the lane, and nothing, nothing but blackberries,
Blackberries on either side, though on the right mainly,
A blackberry alley, going down in hooks, and a sea
Somewhere at the end of it, heaving. Blackberries
Big as the ball of my thumb, and dumb as eyes
Ebon in the hedges, fat
With blue-red juices. These they squander on my fingers.
I had not asked for such a blood sisterhood; they must love me.
They accommodate themselves to my milkbottle, flattening their sides.
Overhead go the choughs in black, cacophonous flocks—
Bits of burnt paper wheeling in a blown sky.
Theirs is the only voice, protesting, protesting.
I do not think the sea will appear at all.
The high, green meadows are glowing, as if lit from within.
I come to one bush of berries so ripe it is a bush of flies,
Hanging their bluegreen bellies and their wing panes in a Chinese screen.
The honey-feast of the berries has stunned them; they believe in heaven.
One more hook, and the berries and bushes end.
The only thing to come now is the sea.
From between two hills a sudden wind funnels at me,
Slapping its phantom laundry in my face.
These hills are too green and sweet to have tasted salt.
I follow the sheep path between them. A last hook brings me
To the hills’ northern face, and the face is orange rock
That looks out on nothing, nothing but a great space
Of white and pewter lights, and a din like silversmiths
Beating and beating at an intractable metal.
Sylvia Plath, “Blackberrying” from Collected Poems. Copyright © 1960, 1965, 1971, 1981 by the Estate of Sylvia Plath.
About Sylvia Plath
Sylvia Plath was an American poet, short story writer, and novelist. Born in Boston, Massachusetts in 1932, she was one of the most admired and dynamic poets of the 20th century.
Plath met fellow poet Ted Hughes while studying at Cambridge University in England. The two married a few months later, in 1956. In a BBC interview from 1961, she says:
I'd read some of Ted's poems in this magazine and I was very impressed and I wanted to meet him. I went to this little celebration and that's actually where we met...Then we saw a great deal of each other. Ted came back to Cambridge and suddenly we found ourselves getting married a few months later...We kept writing poems to each other. Then it just grew out of that, I guess, a feeling that we both were writing so much and having such a fine time doing it, we decided that this should keep on.
Plath's work explored the poet's own mental struggles, her troubled relationship with Hughes, her vision of herself, nature, and the unresolved issues with her parents.
“Whether Plath wrote about nature, or about the social restrictions on individuals, she stripped away the polite veneer. She let her writing express elemental forces and primeval fears. In doing so, she laid bare the contradictions that tore apart appearance and hinted at some of the tensions hovering just beneath the surface of the American way of life in the post war period”,
says Margaret Rees.
Plath published two major works during her lifetime:
The Colossus and Other Poems (1960),
The Bell Jar (1963), her only novel.
Both of them recieved warm, mild reviews.
Perhaps her most praised work of all is Ariel (1965), a collection of poems created in an intense burst of creativity in the final weeks before her death, for which Oates says that:
“ they read as if they’ve been chiseled, with a fine surgical instrument, out of arctic ice.”
Suffering from clinical depression, hurt by the man she loved, and failing to kill herself several times, Sylvia Plath finally committed suicide in 1963, by inhaling gas from her kitchen oven.
She was only 30 years old.
Notes On Plath's "BLACKBERRYING"
According to Plath's husband, poet Ted Hughes, “Blackberrying” was written in 1960 after the couple's return to England and the birth of their daughter. It was not included in Plath's 1960 collection Colossus, however, but was first published in 1971, in the posthumous volume Crossing the Water.
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