In Defense of Apples

 Let me say right up front that I like apples, all kinds of apples, and all colors, and my initial intention with this journal writing was to make a case for the apple as a symbol of all that’s good. I will go right on insisting that apples are good and suffer from slander laid on them-- by poets and painters and people who insist that an apple was the original forbidden fruit or that in its delicious freshness there is the inevitable reminder that freshness doesn’t last. Although I tend to resist the idea that the apple in art is appropriate as memento mori, there’s no avoiding the suggestion by Robert Frost in his poem, “After Apple-Picking” that the fruit is associated at the end of the day with the “long sleep... coming on.”

  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.
 Essence of winter sleep is on the night,
The scent of apples: I am drowsing off.
I cannot rub the strangeness from my sight
I got from looking through a pane of glass
I skimmed this morning from the drinking trough
And held against the world of hoary grass.
It melted, and I let it fall and break.
But I was well
Upon my way to sleep before it fell, And I could tell
What form my dreaming was about to take.
Magnified apples appear and disappear,
Stem end and blossom end,
And every fleck of russet showing clear.
My instep arch not only keeps the ache,
It keeps the pressure of a ladder-round.
I feel the ladder sway as the boughs bend.
And I keep hearing from the cellar bin
The rumbling sound
Of load on load of apples coming in.
For I have had too much
Of apple-picking: I am overtired
Of the great harvest I myself desired.
There were ten thousand thousand fruit to touch,
Cherish in hand, lift down, and not let fall.
For all
That struck the earth,
No matter if not bruised or spiked with stubble,
Went surely to the cider-apple heap
As of no worth.
One can see what will trouble
This sleep of mine, whatever sleep it is.
Were he not gone,
The woodchuck could say whether it's like his
Long sleep, as I describe its coming on,
Or just some human sleep.