An Apple Gathering

Themes

• Allegorical fable, used to convey a moral lesson or ethical principle  

• Dominant metaphor of apples as a symbol of temptation and premature self-indulgence 

• Procreation versus female libido  

• Use of two distinct setting explores the two life choices that women can choose  

Context

• Book of Genesis and reference to the Tree of Knowledge acts as a mirroring of Eve’s punishment and reminder of her sin. Rossetti reconfigures Eve’s transgression and subsequent suffering into a cautionary mediation on female desire and judgement from a Victorian society. 

• The speaker is a fallen woman – one deemed unworthy by society, usually as a result of sexual depravity outside of marriage. This theme was common in Victorian-era poetry 

• Women must submit to sex, not expected to enjoy it (close your eyes and think of England) only used to bear children. Differing views on sexual relations due to class – middle class were the most prude 

• Double standards for men and women – women expected to be pure whilst men were not. Men would have likely had experiences with prostitution

• The Fallen Woman was a popular figure in Victorian culture. The poet laureate of the time, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, explored the subject in poems such as ‘Mariana’, with sympathy towards the woman but from a different standpoint. This and other writings of the time are often written from the female point of view but are always recounted by a – presumably male – omniscient narrator. By giving the fallen woman herself a voice in ‘Maude Clare’ and ‘An Apple Gathering’, Rossetti is challenging Victorian society’s outlook on women who step outside their predetermined roles.

Structure

• Metrical rhythm is unusual in that the regular iambic pentameter pattern is replaced in the last line of each stanza by iambic tetrameter (truncation). Though unsettling, this gives the last line of each stanza additional emphasis. This almost unfinished or unfulfilled line of poetry could be symbolic of the speaker, and how the loss of her virginity has truncated her own future prospects 

• (Ballad form - need to check) and use of a musical pattern imbues the poem with a sense of euphony - perhaps a reflection of the fact that a fable is an oral tradition, recounted verbally as a message to women across the world (e.g. ‘laughing and listening’ uses strong musical alliteration). Rossetti turns away from the formal clarity of classical verse to the earlier oral, ballad form - thus entering an earlier world in the hopes of prompting readers to think about the problems of our own world.

• Uniform quatrains may reflect homogenised attitudes towards women in Victorian society, expected to conform and adhere to the prescribed role of womanhood

• use of imagery to create a closed moral arc: mirroring the speaker’s progression from possibility to transgression to punishment and judgement. By opening with ‘I plucked’ she immediately foregrounds the cause of this tragedy at the very beginning of the poem - intensifying the sense of inevitability

‘I plucked pink blossoms’

• Pink blossoms represent virginity and chastity, subsequently the loss of this purity. Typically within Victorian and Romantic poetic tradition, blossoms (as a precursor to fruit) act as a reference to spring-time – a symbol of youth, potential and purity. This underscores the way in which the persona engaged in premarital sex too early, as you cannot harvest fruit only from the blossoms. Rossetti’s readership, particularly those from a middle-class and educated background, would have been well-versed in Victorian floriography - familiar with the symbolic system in which flowers conveyed messages or emotions. They therefore would have been receptive to the idea that Rossetti’s ‘blossoms’ are symbolic of something more than just the flower itself

• Once ‘due season’ comes, she is unable to find marital success as she has no ‘apples.’ Rossetti subtly critiques the impossibility of reclaiming innocence, and through the construction of ‘apples’ as a commodity facilitating love, she explores the way in which the female body was objectified and commodified sexually within Victorian society 

• Awkward alliterative phrase created by the harsh plosive ‘p’ and ‘b’ consonance suggests unease, subverting the visual sweetness of a flower to explore that what seems like a loving act of intimacy has become a barrier to the rest of the speaker’s life. (representing phonologically the motion of ‘pluck[ing]’ )

• ‘I’ plucked, use of the personal pronoun gives herself autonomy and agency in this decision. She made a deliberate decision to do so. This directly parallels Eve’s act of autonomously consuming the forbidden fruit, where Rossetti’s speaker becomes a postlapsarian Eve – a woman who has lost not only love but societal standing.

• In picking the blossoms too early, the narrator forfeits her chance at apples. Or, in enjoying the physical beauty that the blossoms represent (an allusion to sex), she leaves herself bereft of the sustenance a married relationship can offer, represented by the apples that are gathered. The moral offered is to resist the temptation of immediate pleasures when patience can be more rewarding  

‘I found no apples there’

• Indirectly symbolic confession  

• The economy of language in this line echoes the barrenness it describes – Rossetti has chosen to use a short stanza line and blunt syntax to convey not only the harshness of Victorian moral codes, but also the brutal lack of options for a woman in this situation

• Lack of apples is of crucial significance; she has already experienced pleasure, and like the apples, has depleted her store of good fortune – unable to find romantic or marital happiness and opportunities due to societal stigmatisation of unchaste women 

• The apple, laden with biblical and symbolic connotations, becomes a synecdoche for innocence lost, and punishment endured. This aligns with Rossetti’s Anglo-Catholic sensibilities, which often focuses on spiritual discipline and temptation  

‘Dangling basket’

• Suggests she is dragging this basket, signifying her disappointment or weariness – lack of confidence. ‘Dangling’ = lack of direction, stability or purpose (microcosm for the speaker)

• ‘Basket’ as a yonic symbol of a womb  

• The narrator is ‘empty handed’ not only in the sense of having physically no apples, but also having lost something more abstract and important 

• Procreation at the nexus of the Victorian perception of femininity – the speaker is ‘mocked’ for this. Public stigma and ostracization

‘Lilian and Lilias... their heaped-up basket’ 

 

• Lilies as a representation of lilies in Victorian floriography, contextual references to purity and the Virgin Mary. The effect of deriving the names lilian and lilias from lily imagery therefore makes them synonymous with these ideals of chastity - that feminine virtue in the victorian era was inextricable from purity.

• The use of syntactically paralleled names acts as a representation of the homogenisation of women in the era, defined solely by their sexual experiences 

• Angel in the house – epitomise the Victorian idealisation of gender 

• ‘Heaped-up’ as structural antithesis to the speaker’s own empty one, taunting her with an alternative life trajectory that she could have attained. These women have retained their virginity and therefore expect good marriages 

• Proximity of their ‘mother’s home’ suggests comfort, protection and acceptance 

‘A stronger hand’ ‘A voice’ ‘more sweet to me than song’ 

• Metonymy, describing Willie by his body parts. This singled-out images of ‘hand’ and ‘voice’ suggest his almost godlike power over the speaker, who still hasn’t recovered from their separation. These disembodied aspects have a spiritual significance, representing instead the hand and voice of God. ‘A stronger hand than hers helped…’ - biblical allusion perhaps to Isaiah 41:10 (‘I will uphold you with my righteous hand’)

• He is introduced by his physicality rather than his name   

• She is not blaming Willie, his voice is still ‘sweet’ (he is merely a product of society and not viewed as a perpetrator) - there is a double standard – Willie does not loose his good name or standing in the community, with no moral judgement passed on him. Conversely, the young female speaker is ruined
  Central paradox of the poem, where Rossetti critiques not only biblical notions of female culpability, but also Victorian indoctrination and ideals of womanhood  

‘I loitered’

• Repetition of ‘loitered’ shows how she is stuck in a waiting period as a social pariah, aimless and perhaps hopeless 

• The final stanza sees her rejected by the community; but she remains in the orchard cold as night falls. This ending hints at the rest of her life – she will be waiting for love and fulfilment to come along 

• The speaker becomes a passive figure, drifting through a society that condemns her by her sexuality. This adds a layer off quiet protest: Rossetti doesn’t overtly challenge the societal norms, but by imbuing first-person voice to the silenced and marginalised, she exposes the harshness of Victorian moral codes 

• Pathetic fallacy as the ‘night grew chill’ - her external world reflects her internal one; loveless, cold and dark

‘Wore them all evening in my hair’

• Indiscretion

• Having lost her virginity and hence her respectability, does not behave the way Victorian society would have expected of a woman in her situation, or in the way such material is conventionally treated in literature, where the woman’s repentance is often a prerequisite for generating the audience’s sympathy. She is unashamed and proud