Berry Bush Poem by Robert Pinsky

        The poem Berry Bush published by Robert Pinsky uses a diction that could be understood by the average person, but the concepts are harder to understand. There doesn’t appear to be any kind of end rhyme scheme; however, there is some internal rhyming in a few lines. The poem relates to an average life in many ways. The poem is broken up into three stanzas. In the first, all people abandon a town named Long Point Village. They brought everything they owned, even their houses, to the dock. At high tide they were able to drag their houses to Provincetown. Robert is trying to infer that as a people when things get hard we run, and take everything that is important to us with us.  

        The second stanza includes the line “The traveler doesn’t lift the raft on his back And lug it with him on his journey: oh no, he leaves it there behind him.” This is his way of telling us that sometimes, even after all your hard work, you have to give up and let go of the past. It could also be saying that we need to embrace being out in the open without people knowing what we’ve done. That way we can be all that we can be and create new things with new people.

The third stanza summarizes that even after leaving and letting go your past will always still be there. “Sweet berry, illegible ingested seed, scribble Of red allegiances raked along your wrist; Under all the dead thorns sharper than the green,” is the line that really ties the poem together. That even after all you do to move on or get away from your past, you can’t. The past made you who you are and it continues to shape who you are. The ingested berry is like the “sweet” center of our soul before the cruel world corrupts you, but even as it does so the seed is always there. The dead thorns however, are sharper than the green because the dead thorns represent event in your past while the green is what’s happening in the present. They are sharper because they have already had time to take place and affect you while the outcome of the new events is unknown so they cannot yet have an effect.