POETS Day! Comparing Apples and Rossettis

Lady Lilith by Dante Gabriel Rossetti (cropped)

This is no time to be outdoors. It’s only 91° here in Alabama. I say “only” because we’ll settle into the mid to high nineties and see a hundred a few times before the summer’s gone, but this is the first time we’ve hit the nineties this year. I need acclimation time. This is regularly timed heat. It happens every year and we all know it’s coming, until it suddenly does.

There’s no easing into it. It’s not like a soothing warm shower where you can start at tolerable and slowly increase towards shipwreck-fog-thick steam (although it’s arguably as humid.) It’s not like a cold pool where you wade slowly in, brief tiptoe, and then settle. This is immediate and all the worse knowing how wonderfully air conditioning cools if only you were in it. It’s Tartarus.

Just a few days ago I wore a now unthinkable blazer. If you work outside, you don’t need convincing. Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday. Get to shade. Save yourself. Whatever they’re paying you will be enough in a few days when you’ve had time to adjust, but right now, it ain’t.

Conversely, if you work inside you may wanna sit this week out. There will be other POETS Days and some people swear by deferred pleasure. You’re not sweltering. Stick around a while and make sure you’re seen. Maybe read a little verse.

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As best I can tell, this is the entirety of an unfinished poem written between 1869 and 1886 by Dante Gabriel Rossetti. The inexact dates may refer to a starting date and the last known revisions, a window where it’s guessed he likely worked on it, or notes, diary, etc. They are given without further information by Norton’s Anthology of English Literature, Vol II.

The Orchard-Pit
Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-1882)

A Fragment

Piled deep below the screening apple branch
They lie with bitter apples in their hands:
And some are only ancient bones that blanch,
And some had ships that last year’s wind did launch,
And some were yesterday the lords of lands.

In the soft dell, among the apple-trees,
High up above the hidden pit she stands,
And there for ever sings, who gave to these,
That lie below, her magic hour of ease,
And those her apples holden in their hands.

This in my dreams is shown me; and her hair
Crosses my lips and draws my burning breath;
Her song spreads golden wings upon the air,
Life’s eyes are gleaming from her forehead fair,
And from her breasts the ravishing eyes of Death.

Men say to me that sleep hath many dreams,
Yet I knew never but this dream alone:
There, from a dried-up channel, once the stream’s,
The glen slopes up; even such in sleep it seems
As to my waking sight the place well known.
——-
My love I call her, and she loves me well:
But I love her as in the maelstrom’s cup
The whirled stone loves the leaf inseparable
That clings to it round all the circling swell,
And that the same last eddy swallows up.

Oswald Doughty includes a footnote to the fragment in the collection he edited entitled Rossetti’s Poems, which are of Dante’s exclusively rather than of both his and his sister Christina’s.

“J.W. Mackail, the biographer of William Morris, son-in-law of Burne-Jones and friend of many of the Pre-Raphaelites, informed me personally that bitter in the printed text of this poem is in fact a misprint, and that what Rossetti wrote was bitten. The change is by no means unimportant to the meaning of the poem.”

Rossetti left a prose sketch of what he was attempting to render in poetry and it seems to confirm Doughty’s claim.

“Men tell me that sleep has many dreams; but all my life I have dreamt one dream alone.
I see a glen whose sides slope upwards from the deep bed of a dried-up stream, and either slope is covered with wild apple-trees. In the largest tree, within the fork whence the limbs divide, a fair, golden-haired woman stands and sings, with one white arm stretched along a branch of the tree, and with the other holding forth a bright red apple, as if to someone coming down the slope. Below her feet the trees grow more and more tangled, and stretch from both sides across the deep pit below: and the pit is full of the bodies of men.
They lie in heaps beneath the screen of boughs, with her apples bitten in their hands; and some are no more than ancient bones now, and some seem dead but yesterday. She stands over them in the glen, and sings for ever, and offers her apple still.
This dream shows me no strange place. I know the glen, and have known it from childhood, and heard many tales of those who have died there by the Siren’s spell.
I pass there often now, and look at it as one might look at a place chosen for one’s grave. I see nothing, but I know it means death for me.”

I’ve got no date on the prose at all, so it may be that it meant bitten and it came first, then he intentionally changed it to bitter or vice versa, but a misprint makes more sense. It’s not as certain that the woman is a temptress with bitter. You could see her as an observer or embodiment of fortune holding vigil. The men could have latched on to some false apple of greed or what have you where those she holds are something aspirational. They fell for an imitation in that scenario. Bitten is better.

Venus Verticordia by Dante Gabriel Rossetti

Dead apple eaters strewn about with a beautiful woman offering grocer polished versions of the same and beckoning to a valley, one remembered from as far back as can be remembered, that’s filled with entanglements isn’t the subtlest image. “It’s been the ruin of many a poor boy/And God, I know I’m one.”

Allpoetry.com notes “It reflects the influence of the Pre-Raphaelite movement, with its emphasis on symbolism, nature, and the idealization of women.” I’ve got a small quibble with that. Rossetti was one of the founders of the Pre-Raphaelites and per Doughty, their leader. I suppose there was compromise and some subsuming of personal aesthetics to a group vision, but I don’t like saying he was influenced by a movement he was at the forefront of.

I suspect some may have a quibble with his image being called an idealization. Women don’t like being blamed for the fall of man for some reason. Lilith gets mentioned and you worry about sewing scissors, but the metaphor isn’t going away as long as men know it’s within them to be single minded. As my wife says, it’s reductive, but that’s the nature of metaphor. When you say a plane soared like a bird you aren’t implying it had feathers. The whole of a bird is pushed aside but for the single aspect of flight. You’re not looking for a character with depth in your symbols.

Robert Graves managed to embrace women at the same time he held them at a fearful distance. In many of his poems, women are held in awe. He maintains a tension between men’s powerless before them and his knowledge that her power is derived from fealty gladly given. It’s circular and in his hands, supernatural.

At Best, Poets
Robert Graves (1895-1985)

Woman with her forests, moons, flowers, waters,
And watchful fingers:
We claim no magic comparable to hers –
At best, poets; at worst, sorcerers.

I like where Rossetti seemed to be going. “Siren” in the prose is a little too much, but the last stanza of the fragment’s whirlpool is still Homeric without being as sledghammerish. If that’s the direction he was headed, I wish he’d finished. Merits of the poem or eventual poem aside, it’s the apple struck me.

My favorite of his sister’s poems, of which none were included in Doughty’s collection, is “An Apple Gathering.”

An Apple Gathering
Christina Georgina Rossetti (1830 – 1894)

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.

Lilian and Lilias smiled in trudging by,
Their heaped-up basket teased me like a jeer;
Sweet-voiced they sang beneath the sunset sky,
Their mother’s home was near.

Plump Gertrude passed me with her basket full,
A stronger hand than hers helped it along;
A voice talked with her through the shadows cool
More sweet to me than song.

Ah Willie, Willie, was my love less worth
Than apples with their green leaves piled above?
I counted rosiest apples on the earth
Of far less worth than love.

So once it was with me you stooped to talk
Laughing and listening in this very lane:
To think that by this way we used to walk
We shall not walk again!

I let my neighbours pass me, ones and twos
And groups; the latest said the night grew chill,
And hastened: but I loitered, while the dews
Fell fast I loitered still.

A quick aside: As I collect poems for these posts I copy and paste, or type them out when I can’t find an online source, to a separate document and then copy and paste them to my draft as needed. Sometimes I look at word count, sometimes I don’t. Today I did. “The Orchard-Pit” comes in at 216 words. As does “An Apple Gathering.” That’s before I added Dante’s name and dates, but that’s still kinda neat. I might not have mentioned that, but I’d already noticed that Rossetti (Dante) was born in ’28 and died in ’82 and Graves was born in 1895 and died in 1985. I celebrate numerical efficiency.

Ecce Ancilla Domini by Dante Gabriel Rossetti

“An Apple Gathering” was published in Christina Rossetti’s first collection of poetry, The Goblin Market and Other Poems (1862.) “The Goblin Market” is a longer poem about two sisters named Lizzie and Laura. Some goblins come along and try to entice the girls to eat their forbidden fruit. Lizzie passes but Laura tries it, gets hooked, needs saving to avoid the fate of off-stage cautionary tale, Jeanie, recovers thanks to her sister, and is redeemed.

In “An Apple Gathering,” there are two girls named Lilian and Lilias. They’re obviously meant to recall to the reader Lizzie and Laura. Rather than being forbidden or tempting, in this poem apples represent wholesomeness; grace or the bounty earned of a good life. Rossetti expects that we equate the pairs of girls, but by changing names, we don’t know which of Lilian and Lilias gave in to the goblins. The idea is that once forgiven, the redeemed and the ever chaste are indistinguishable; such is the cleansing power of Christ. It’s very effective.

Apples’ use in story goes pretty far back. Christianity, of course. Eris set off the Trojan War with one. They’ve had time and exposure enough to carry all manner of meaning. Their use in poetry isn’t unique to either Dante or Christina, nor do they pop up in either’s work all that often, at least it’s not in the bits I’ve read. Christina’s poem is regarded as one of her best and Dante’s fragment showed a promising direction. He saw them as a tool to tempt men and she saw them as just rewards. Again, lots of poets have written about apples, but I saw “The Orchard-Pit” and immediately thought of “An Apple Gathering.” I can’t shake the suspicion that something extraordinary, indelible, and open to wildly divergent interpretations happened on a Rossetti family orchard trip.