I became distracted and didn’t finish all my apple posts in September. So here are some excerpts from a few apple poems with a link in each instance to the entire poem. The painting is called Apple Gatherers by Frederick Morgan.
After Apple-Picking by Robert Frost: My long two-pointed ladder’s sticking through a tree
Toward heaven still,
And there’s a barrel that I didn’t fill
Beside it, and there may be two or three
Apples I didn’t pick upon some bough.
But I am done with apple-picking now.
The Apple Orchard by Rainer Marie Rilke Come let us watch the sun go down
and walk in twilight through the orchard’s green.
Does it not seem as if we had for long
collected, saved and harbored within us
old memories?
An Apple-Gathering by Christina Rossetti I plucked pink blossoms from mine apple tree
And wore them all that evening in my hair:
Then in due season when I went to see
I found no apples there.
With dangling basket all along the grass
As I had come I went the selfsame track:
My neighbours mocked me while they saw me pass
So empty-handed back.
7 thoughts on “Poetry Friday: Apple Poems”
I came across this quote the other day and loved it:
“To appreciate the wild and sharp flavors of these October fruits, it is necessary that you be breathing the sharp October or November air. What is sour in the house a bracing walk makes sweet. Some of these apples might be labeled, “To be eaten in the wind.†It takes a savage or wild taste to appreciate a wild fruit. . . The era of the Wild Apple will soon be past. It is a fruit which will probably become extinct in New England. I fear that he who walks over these fields a century hence will not know the pleasure of knocking off wild apples. Ah, poor soul, there are many pleasures which you will not know! . . . the end of it all will be that we shall be compelled to look for our apples in a barrel.”
– Henry David Thoreau
I came across this quote the other day and loved it:
“To appreciate the wild and sharp flavors of these October fruits, it is necessary that you be breathing the sharp October or November air. What is sour in the house a bracing walk makes sweet. Some of these apples might be labeled, “To be eaten in the wind.†It takes a savage or wild taste to appreciate a wild fruit. . . The era of the Wild Apple will soon be past. It is a fruit which will probably become extinct in New England. I fear that he who walks over these fields a century hence will not know the pleasure of knocking off wild apples. Ah, poor soul, there are many pleasures which you will not know! . . . the end of it all will be that we shall be compelled to look for our apples in a barrel.”
– Henry David Thoreau
HAH!
Great minds! Jama has this one today, too.
I love seeing them all collected up together — and many thanks to SmallWorld for the Thoreau as well.
You have a great mind, Sherry! I’m celebrating apples this month at my blog. The Rilke poem is new to me. Thanks!
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Worse yet, dear Henry, to find them in the fridge.
I love a good sharp Macintosh right off the tree!
Cool! Poetry AND the art to go with it! I might have to steal…uh…BORROW this idea in the future!