My cousins’ apple orchard (Our “cottage” is the structure on the left.)
Friday
As I write this, I am sitting in our summer cottage’s screened-in porch atop Ricker Hill gazing out over the apple orchards, so it seems only appropriate to share some apple poems. The apples, though still green, are so lovely that one can see why they are the fruit most often associated with the great temptation.
I start, then, with Satan’s sales job in Paradise Lost:
Till on a day roving the field, I chanced
A goodly Tree far distant to behold
Laden with fruit of fairest colors mixed,
Ruddy and gold: I nearer drew to gaze;
When from the boughs a savory odor blown,
Grateful to appetite, more pleased my sense,
Than smell of sweetest fennel or the teats
Of ewe or goat dropping with milk at even,
Unsucked of lamb or kid, that tend their play.
To satisfy the sharp desire I had
Of tasting those fair apples, I resolved
Not to defer; hunger and thirst at once,
Powerful persuaders, quickened at the scent
Of that alluring fruit, urged me so keen.
About the mossy trunk I wound me soon…
Milton associates his tempting apples with power, but by the 19th century they have become bound up with sex. “Apples russet and dun” are among the fruit offered up by the tempters in Christina Rossetti’s Goblin Market. With this forbidden fruit comes the end of innocence:
Morning and evening
Maids heard the goblins cry:
“Come buy our orchard fruits,
Come buy, come buy:
Apples and quinces,
Lemons and oranges,
Plump unpeck’d cherries,
Melons and raspberries,
Bloom-down-cheek’d peaches,
Swart-headed mulberries,
Wild free-born cranberries,
Crab-apples, dewberries,
Pine-apples, blackberries,
Apricots, strawberries;—
All ripe together
In summer weather…
Literary scholars Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar (in Madwoman in the Attic) argue that the poisoned apple offered the Grimm Brothers’ Snow White represents sexual maturity and, again, an end of virginal purity. The dwarfs’ adult injunctions cannot protect her:
Then [the wicked stepmother] went into her most secret room — no one else was allowed inside — and she made a poisoned apple. From the outside it was beautiful, white with red cheeks, and anyone who saw it would want it. But anyone who might eat a little piece of it would die. Then, coloring her face, she disguised herself as a peasant woman, and thus went across the seven mountains to the seven dwarfs. She knocked on the door.
Snow-White stuck her head out the window and said, “I am not allowed to let anyone in. The dwarfs have forbidden me to do so.”
“That is all right with me,” answered the peasant woman. “I’ll easily get rid of my apples. Here, I’ll give you one of them.”
“No,” said Snow-White, “I cannot accept anything.”
“Are you afraid of poison?” asked the old woman. “Look, I’ll cut the apple in two. You eat the red half, and I shall eat the white half.”
Now the apple had been so artfully made that only the red half was poisoned. Snow-White longed for the beautiful apple, and when she saw that the peasant woman was eating part of it she could no longer resist, and she stuck her hand out and took the poisoned half. She barely had a bite in her mouth when she fell to the ground dead.
Snow White’s longing is for adult sexual experience. Apples signify sexual fulfillment as well for Algernon Charles Swinburne (in “August”) as he lies lying beneath apples trees:
There were four apples on the tree,
Gold stained on red that all might see
The sweet blood filled them to the core:
The color of her hair is more
Like stems of fair faint gold, that be
Mown from the harvest’s middle floor.
In “The Song of the Wandering Aengus,” William Butler Yeats, after momentarily encountering a visionary maid, dreams of a day when the two of them will meet again and pick mythical apples:
Though I am old with wandering
Through hollow lands and hilly lands,
I will find out where she has gone,
And kiss her lips and take her hands;
And walk among long dappled grass,
And pluck till time and times are done
The silver apples of the moon,
The golden apples of the sun.
Lucille Clifton turns the temptation story on its head in “eve’s version,” where she refuses to feel ashamed of her sexual body but instead embraces it:
smooth talker
slides into my dreams
and fills them with apple
apple snug as my breast
in the palm of my hand
apple sleek apple sweet
and bright in my mouth
it is your own lush self
you hunger for
he whispers lucifer
honey-tongue.
Grace Schulman has written one of my favorite apple poems. She is so entranced with the memories conjured up by apples that she says that she would undergo Eve’s fall and choose the bitterness of exile, “forfeit mist for hail,” if it involved plunging herself in the taste of “earth and song”:
Rain hazes a street cart’s green umbrella
but not its apples, heaped in paper cartons,
dry under cling film. The apple man,
who shirrs his mouth as though eating tart fruit,
exhibits four like racehorses at auction:
Blacktwig, Holland, Crimson King, Salome.
I tried one and its cold grain jolted memory:
a hill where meager apples fell so bruised
that locals wondered why we scooped them up,
my friend and I, in matching navy blazers.
One bite and I heard her laughter toll,
free as school’s out, her face flushed in late sun.
I asked the apple merchant for another,
jaunty as Cezanne’s still-life reds and yellows,
having more life than stillness, telling us,
uncut, unpeeled, they are not for the feast
but for themselves, and building strength to fly
at any moment, leap from a skewed bowl,
whirl in the air, and roll off a tilted table.
Fruit-stand vendor, master of Northern Spies,
let a loose apple teach me how to spin
at random, burn in light and rave in shadows.
Bring me a Winesap like the one Eve tasted,
savored and shared, and asked for more.
No fool, she knew that beauty strikes just once,
hard, never in comfort. For that bitter fruit,
tasting of earth and song, I’d risk exile.
The air is bland here. I would forfeit mist
for hail, put on a robe of dandelions,
and run out, broken, to weep and curse — for joy.
In short, apples are more than apples.