Wednesday 23 June 2021

The Silver Apples of the Moon, the Golden Apples of the Sun




This was our apple tree last September, so laden with fruit that branches actually cracked and broke off under the weight, as though taking Keats’ lines from Ode to Autumn far too literally –

To bend with apples the mossed cottage-trees
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core… 

The lawn was almost ankle deep in windfalls.

What is it about apples? Why are they so evocative? Why was the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil – not actually named in the Bible – assumed to be an apple? Why did the Firebird, in Russian folklore, steal golden apples from the garden of the Czar? Why did golden apples of immortality grow in the Garden of the Hesperides, why was the Norse goddess Idun the keeper of golden apples which preserved the youth of the gods? Why was the Apple of Discord – with its inscription To the Fairest – an apple, and why were three golden apples so irresistible to Atalanta that she paused to pick them up and lost her race? (Mind you, that dress she's wearing wouldn't help.) 
 



The apple as the fruit of immortality, or perhaps equally of death, appears as a symbol in Celtic mythology too. Heralds from the Land of Youth might bear a silver apple branch, with silver blossom and golden fruit whose tinkling music lulled the hearers to sleep – perhaps to everlasting sleep. Arthur, after his final battle, went to the island of Avalon, the island of apples, to be healed of his mortal wound. Then of course there’s the apple given by the wicked Queen to Snow-White, one bite of which sends the little princess into a death-like sleep.    
 
 


Apples are tokens of love and promises of eternity. In Yeat’s ‘The Song of Wandering Aengus’, the lovelorn Aengus seeks forever the beautiful girl from the hazel wood.

Though I am old with wandering
Through hollow lands and hilly lands
I 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.

But such an eternity is probably also the land beyond death. 

Where do apples even come from, why are they so ubiquitous? Why, even today, are so many varieties available even in supermarkets, usually the home of homogeneity? I went into our local Sainsburys the other day and counted eleven different named varieties of apple all on sale at once: Empire, Royal Gala, Red Delicious, Golden Delicious, Cox’s Orange Pippin, Russets, Granny Smiths, Pink Ladies, Jazz, Braeburns and Bramleys. By contrast, there were only four named varieties of pears, and everything else was generic – bananas, strawberries, oranges, etc. 
 
 

Apples are related to roses, I’m delighted to tell you.  According to a rather lovely book called ‘Apples: the story of the fruit of temptation’, by Frank Browning (Penguin 1998):

‘In the beginning there were roses.  Small flowers of five white petals opened on low, thorny stems, scattered across the earth in the pastures of the dinosaurs, about eighty million years ago. …These bitter-fruited bushes, among the first flowering plants on earth, emerged as the vast Rosaceae family and from them came most of the fruits human beings eat today: apples, pears, plums, quinces, even peaches, cherries, strawberries, raspberries and blackberries.

‘The apple [paleobotanists believe]… was the unlikely child of an extra-conjugal affair between a primitive plum from the rose family and a wayward flower with white and yellow blossoms of the Spirea family, called meadowsweet.’ 

Isn’t that wonderful? Apples as we know them today developed in Europe and Asia. The Pharoahs grew them. The Greeks and Romans grew them. And they keep. You can store apples overwinter, eat them months after you’ve picked them: fresh fruit in hard cold weather when there’s nothing growing outside. So perhaps you would think of them as life-giving, immortal fruit. They smell fragrant. They feel good too: hard-fleshed, smooth, a cool weight in the hand.  



The medieval lyric 'Adam lay y-bounden' provocatively celebrates the Fall of Man when Adam ate the forbidden fruit:

And all was for an appil
An appil that he toke
As clerkes finden
Written in her boke.

It ends on the mischievously subversive thought that if Adam had not eaten the apple, Our Lady would never have become the Heavenly Queen:

Blessed be the time
That appil take was!
Therefore we maun singen:
Deo gratias.


Here is a poem by John Drinkwater (surely the most poetically-named poet ever!) which captures some of those mystical coincidences of apples, eternity, sleep, moonlight, magic and death. 

MOONLIT APPLES

At the top of the house the apples are laid in rows,
And the skylight lets the moonlight in, and those
Apples are deep-sea apples of green. There goes
A cloud on the moon in the autumn night.

A mouse in the wainscot scratches, and scratches, and then
There is no sound at the top of the house of men
Or mice; and the cloud is blown, and the moon again
Dapples the apples with deep-sea light.

They are lying in rows there, under the gloomy beams
On the sagging floor; they gather the silver streams
Out of the moon, those moonlit apples of dreams
And quiet is the steep stair under.

In the corridors under there is nothing but sleep.
And stiller than ever on orchard boughs they keep
Tryst with the moon, and deep is the silence, deep
On moon-washed apples of wonder.



Picture credits:

Apple tree: Author's garden
Atalanta racing Hippomenes: Willen van Herp, c1650
Silver Apples: Margaret Macdonald Mackintosh
Adam and Eve: Lucas Cranach, 1537
Apple Tree: Arthur Rackham

 

3 comments:

  1. Oh, this was so beautiful! And I'd just been thinking of a poem that search engines will not yield up to me — I must remember it imperfectly.

    I only remember something like:
    "I wish that my old apple tree
    Could somehow chance to look
    More like the perfect specimen
    That's figured in my book.
    If it were so, 'twould easy prove
    To prune it where I'm told,
    With [limbs?] to carry fruit
    And [something else] replacing old..."

    It was in a little gift book of poetry I saw a long time ago. But I haven't found it again.

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  2. I think of the “glimmering girl” in the Wandering Aengus as the symbol of the inner feminine with which the psyche of a man seeks union. But a complete spiritual union isn’t a feature of life on this plain - it presents itself, then “vanishes” as does the girl in the poem. That ultimate union comes in death when we dwell with God, but we nonetheless seek it in life, til “time and times are done.” The golden apples, the silver apples are everywhere around us but we still search for what they reference, not just a union with a flesh and blood man or woman - few of us search all or lives without finding something akin to that- but the ultimate oneness with what in life is intangible becomes an unconscious spiritual quest which takes on the numinous quality that Yeats imbues with such aching mysticism.
    The apple is the beautiful yet ubiquitous symbol of life and death or of their inevitable intersection.
    The anonymous hymn “Christ the Apple Tree” compares what we see in your gorgeous photograph of the fully realized tangible real life tree to the ultimate spiritual ideal.
    The tree of life my soul has seen
    Laden with fruit and always green
    The trees of nature fruitless be
    Compared with Christ the Apple Tree

    We relate harmoniously with apples; they offer variety, they taste good and they’re said to be good for us. Yet they’re common and easy to store. They are dependable when we cook with them; they are not delicate nor do they require fussing with. They are a staple and not exotic. So mystics and poets ornament them to get our attention. They say, “ Look. There’s something more here than your familiar old apples.; these are GOLDEN apples, of the sun, no less; they’re SHIMMERING like the silver moon. Go after them. You’ll never grasp them but you will pursue them always. They are teaching you that there is something, although you thought you knew all about them, that lies beyond their fruitiness which has an eternal implications.
    The apple is the perfect simple fruit, so familiar that is also the perfect symbol.



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    Replies
    1. Thankyou for this lovely reflection on apples and their significance.

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