Oh softling
Little downy cheeping one
Still warm in your pile of flakes
Neither feathers nor fledging in your future 
Carrying all your unfulfilled eggy promise with you 

How a body can transmute so quickly
from a being to be caressed 
with only the gentlest of touches

To a bundle of matter 
and the question –
Where do you go now? 

Dorothy weighed options
Each worse than the last,

Sylvia saw boxes
So she turned up the gas.

Edna melted her candles,
Fell down the stairs in the dark.

Anne wrote fairy tales
But it wasn’t a lark.

Ginny’s in the river,
Having gone for a swim.

Sara thought she’d forgotten,
But the rain did her in.

Me? I’m a madwoman
Trapped in my own attic

Wondering if I ought
Not be so dramatic.

There is no neat locus of blame anymore –
the overgrown fruit has been excised.
Though the belly still swells, remembering its sole occupant
a pomegranate filled with rotting seeds.

Too large at a pound,
but too small to be weighted with the burden
of the body
of the family
of the future.

Small wonder then, you should find yourself a little erratic
beneath the pressure.

And how do you find yourself now that your bits and pieces
will wander no more?
Unencumbered and forever swimming pickled in a clear jar?
Incinerated and sent skyward as wisps of ash floating on the wind?

What I mean to say, is that I hope you’re free.

Blackberrying is one of my favorite Sylvia Plath poems. It’s certainly dark – there’s a sense of compression in the beginning, an almost claustrophobic paranoia as the narrator is forced alone through this dark alley, feeling watched by large dark eyes all around. But these berries aren’t hostile, despite the hooks and barbs surrounding them. They change shape so she can hold them in her milk bottle, they leave the blood of sisterhood on her fingers. They are so sweet that they stun the flies into believing in heaven. It’s as if she’s born into this field.

Above everything is the promise of the sea. Though the narrator is ostensibly picking blackberries, it seems she’s really on her way to the sea, the wide open expanse that slaps her in the face after the sweet green hills spit her out into the open. She wasn’t exactly sure where it was when she set out, at one point she nearly loses faith she’ll see it all, and then there it is, once she follows the path of the sheep. But reaching her destination doesn’t bring a sense of calm, or peace – it’s a message of futility and emptiness, an image of trying to impose a will on a material that will not be bent or hammered into shape.

A reader almost wonders if she’s on this walk to pick berries at all, or if the blackberries were just an excuse to come to this vast loneliness, here on a high hill overlooking the sea? It’s a good question for any journey, any life, really. Are we marching towards “a face that looks out on nothing,” or are we meandering, gathering what sweetness we can when it’s ripe? Even though we know how Sylvia’s life ended, I’d like to think her title of the poem is a vote for the latter.

Blackberrying

By Sylvia Plath

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.

Blackberry photo via Wikimedia user Arria Belli.