The Full Text of “An Apple Gathering”
1I plucked pink blossoms from mine apple-tree
2And wore them all that evening in my hair:
3Then in due season when I went to see
4I found no apples there.
5With dangling basket all along the grass
6As I had come I went the self-same track:
7My neighbours mocked me while they saw me pass
8So empty-handed back.
9Lilian and Lilias smiled in trudging by,
10Their heaped-up basket teased me like a jeer;
11Sweet-voiced they sang beneath the sunset sky,
12Their mother's home was near.
13Plump Gertrude passed me with her basket full,
14A stronger hand than hers helped it along;
15A voice talked with her through the shadows cool
16More sweet to me than song.
17Ah Willie, Willie, was my love less worth
18Than apples with their green leaves piled above?
19I counted rosiest apples on the earth
20Of far less worth than love.
21So once it was with me you stooped to talk
22Laughing and listening in this very lane;
23To think that by this way we used to walk
24We shall not walk again!
25I let my neighbours pass me, ones and twos
26And groups; the latest said the night grew chill,
27And hastened: but I loitered; while the dews
28Fell fast I loitered still.
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“An Apple Gathering” Introduction
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"An Apple Gathering" is Victorian poet Christina Rossetti's tale of heartbreak and betrayal. The poem's speaker is a young woman who's been unlucky and unwise in love: having used the blossoms of her symbolic apple tree to make herself beautiful for her lover, Willie, she now finds that she has no apples left to harvest—and that Willie has left her for another woman. The poem reflects on the dangers of head-over-heels love, the pain of abandonment, and the cruelty of sexual double standards. This poem first appeared in Rossetti's important collection Goblin Market and Other Poems (1862).
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“An Apple Gathering” Summary
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I picked the pink flowers from my apple tree so I could wear them in my hair that night. Later, when it was time to harvest apples, I went back and found that none had grown.
Carrying my empty basket on my arm, I walked back over the grass the same way I'd come. My neighbors made fun of me when they saw me returning with no apples.
The sisters Lilian and Lilias smirked at me as they passed. Their basket, overflowing with apples, seemed to mock me. The sisters sang together under the light of the sunset; they were almost all the way to their mother's house.
The curvy Gertrude went past with a basket full of apples, too—and a strong man helped her to carry it. As she made her way through the shadows of dusk, a voice that I found more beautiful than music talked to her.
Oh Willie, Willie! Did my love mean less to you than a crop of apples in a leafy green tree? I've seen the loveliest, ripest apples in the world, but they're not worth nearly as much as love.
Once upon a time, you deigned to talk to me in just the same way you're talking to Gertrude now, laughing with me and listening to me on this selfsame path. How strange it is to reflect that we used to make this journey together, but never will again!
I let my neighbors go past me, alone and in pairs and in groups. The last few who went past said it was getting chilly out and hurried along. But I stayed put. Even as the dew began to fall, I stayed exactly where I was.
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“An Apple Gathering” Themes
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Sexism and Double Standards
“An Apple Gathering” tells the sad tale of a woman whose life is ruined by the sexual double standards of British society in the 1800s—a time and place when women were supposed to have sex only after marriage, while men could essentially do what they liked. Early in the year, the poem’s speaker picked all the “blossoms” from her apple tree to make herself beautiful for her lover Willie, an image that suggests she offered him her virginity. Now, it’s autumn, her tree has of course grown no apples, and Willie has left her for a woman with a more bountiful “harvest”—in other words, a woman who has reaped all the rewards of playing by society’s rules. Through these symbolic images of fruit and flowers, the poem explores the consequences of sexist double standards. The same act that destroys a woman’s life, the poem observes, makes no difference whatsoever to a man’s.
The speaker makes the mistake of giving all her love away to the treacherous Willie too soon. The “pink blossoms” she plucks from her apple tree to adorn her hair one fateful “evening” symbolize that young love—and, likely, the speaker’s virginity, which it would have been taboo for a woman to lose before marriage in this poem’s 19th-century world.
This premature gift leaves the speaker with no apples to harvest later on, suggesting that her world sees her as diminished by her relationship with Willie. It’s as if she herself were now a barren, used-up tree with nothing to offer. The women who didn’t give their blossom-like love away, meanwhile, have plenty of apples—that is, plenty of value in the eyes of society.
Worse still, no one has any sympathy for the speaker: she’s the laughingstock of the town. The sisters “Lilian and Lilias,” with their full baskets, seem to “jeer” at her, and “Gertrude” blithely walks right past her on Willie’s arm, flaunting her new relationship. Women’s sexual choices, the poem suggests, can turn them into outcasts in the blink of an eye.
Willie himself, on the other hand, can skip right off to enjoy Gertrude’s apple harvest without consequences—an image that suggests he still gets to reap all the benefits of a societally approved relationship, including security and respectability. While the speaker, a woman who gave her love away “too soon,” suffers fearful consequences, the man involved in the very same act gets off scot-free.
Sexual double standards, the poem thus shows, have serious consequences for women. The speaker ends the poem completely alone in the frosty orchard, unable to return to a town that despises her. The speaker and Willie were both involved in whatever happened that fateful “evening” in spring—but only the speaker is shamed and ostracized for it.
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The Pain of Heartbreak and Betrayal
The speaker of “An Apple Gathering” laments the behavior of her no-good, two-timing lover Willie, and seems to feel she might never recover from his betrayal. Back in the spring, she recalls, she gave him her whole heart (and likely her virginity), only for him to dump her for another woman by the time autumn rolled around. Through images of a failed apple harvest, the poem suggests that heartbreak and betrayal can feel as painful as hunger and frostbite, leaving a person feeling abandoned, starved, and sunk in icy despair.
The speaker, the poem suggests, was once so head-over-heels for Willie that she gave him everything—perhaps even more than was prudent. Remembering the previous spring, the speaker recalls that she stripped all the “pink blossoms” from her apple tree to dress up for a big “evening” out with Willie, an image that symbolically hints she might also have offered him all her young love—heart, soul, and body—on that fateful night.
But when fall rolls around and the bare apple tree can’t produce any fruit, the speaker realizes that Willie loved her more for what she could give him than for who she was. He’s gone off with “Gertrude,” a woman who didn’t give all her symbolic “blossoms” away—and who thus now reaps a secure harvest of both apples and love. It’s precisely because the speaker gave Willie everything she had that she’s emptyhanded now: loving Willie with her all, she’s left with nothing when he abandons her.
The pain of romantic betrayal, the poem concludes, can be deep enough to destroy a life. As the poem ends, the speaker “loiter[s]” all alone in the orchard as the rest of the happy apple-harvesters make their way home through an increasingly “chill” and frosty evening; the poem implies that the speaker might never go home at all, but stay in the orchard until she freezes, apple-less and outcast. A broken heart, this final image suggests, can hurt so badly it feels as if the pain might be fatal.
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Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis of “An Apple Gathering”
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Lines 1-4
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.The first stanza of "An Apple Gathering" reveals that this will be a poem about unforeseen consequences. The speaker begins by recalling the past spring, when she "plucked" all the "pink blossoms" from her apple tree to adorn her hair one memorable night. Now, it's harvest time—and with no blossoms for fruit to grow from, her "apple-tree" is bare.
There's plenty here to suggest that those blossoms are symbolic ones. When the speaker says she gathered blossoms to make herself beautiful for "that evening," she gives readers the sense that this was a special night, a memorable one. And if it was a night upon which she wanted to look especially lovely, it seems as if something romantic must have been going on. The blossoms she gathered, in other words, seem to represent the youthful love she offered to a beloved back in the spring.
The imagery here suggests that this love was probably physical as well as emotional. Those blushing "pink blossoms," suggesting warm flesh, hint that the speaker might have lost her virginity (or at least engaged in more physical intimacy than was considered proper at the time) as well as her heart "that evening" back in spring. But whatever might have happened "that evening," the speaker is in trouble now. In giving up all her blossom-like love, she's left empty-handed when harvest time rolls around: her apple tree can't bear fruit.
The poem's meter evokes just how shocking this discovery feels to her. The poem begins in steady iambic pentameter—lines of five iambs, metrical feet with a da-DUM rhythm, like this:
I plucked | pink blos- | soms from | mine ap- | ple-tree
But the last line of the stanza is in iambic trimeter, with only three iambs:
I found | no ap- | ples there.
This changed rhythm suggests both that the speaker is brought up short by the sight of her sad, bare apple tree, and that other things might have been cut short as well—her love affair, for instance.
Even the assonance and alliteration in these lines hints that there's sorrow ahead:
Then in due season when I went to see
I found no apples there.Those interweaving sounds make these lines sound like a musical lament, a song of heartbreak.
And that's exactly what this poem will turn out to be: the lament of a woman suffering a betrayal—and worse, suffering it in a sexist world that judges women and men very differently for the exact same choices.
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Lines 5-8
With dangling basket all along the grass
As I had come I went the self-same track:
My neighbours mocked me while they saw me pass
So empty-handed back.
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Lines 9-10
Lilian and Lilias smiled in trudging by,
Their heaped-up basket teased me like a jeer; -
Lines 11-12
Sweet-voiced they sang beneath the sunset sky,
Their mother's home was near. -
Lines 13-16
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. -
Lines 17-20
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. -
Lines 21-24
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! -
Lines 25-28
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.
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“An Apple Gathering” Symbols
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Apples, Blossoms, and the Harvest
The poem's apple harvest—or the lack thereof—symbolizes women's sexual purity and reputations.
When the poem's speaker goes out to harvest apples in the fall, she discovers that there's nothing in her tree: she picked all the apple blossoms to adorn her hair in the spring, back when she was falling in love with "Willie," the lover who has betrayed her now. The suggestion here is that she gave Willie too much love, too soon: she's been foolhardy in plucking the symbolic "blossoms" of young love for him right away. Perhaps she even lost her virginity to him—a huge taboo in the Victorian world in which this poem was written.
The other women of the town, meanwhile, have a bountiful harvest of symbolic apples: the sisters Lilian and Lilias are happy together and secure in their "mother's home," while "plump Gertrude" has harvested Willie himself. In other words, they've done what the world expects of them, hanging on to their sexual purity and reaping the rewards of social approval.
The poem's images of blossoms, apples, and harvests all thus reflect the dangers of romantic love—especially in the Victorian era, when losing one's virginity before marriage could make a woman a pariah.
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“An Apple Gathering” Poetic Devices & Figurative Language
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Imagery
The poem's imagery helps to turn this tale of sexism and betrayal into a little play, inviting readers into the speaker's experiences.
In the very first line, the speaker describes the choice that becomes her downfall: she picked all the blossoms from her apple tree so that she could make herself beautiful for her lover Willie. The image of those "pink blossoms" invites readers to imagine an apple tree in spring, with its clouds of flowers. This vision suggests, not just how the speaker's tree looked, but how her heart felt at the time: as if it had burst into bloom. And the blossoms' pinkness also suggests the blush of love—a bodily image that reminds readers those blossoms are a symbol, not just for the speaker's feelings, but for her virginity.
Later on, though, the speaker finds that this choice has left her empty-handed: with no blossoms to grow from, no apples have appeared on her tree. The imagery in the rest of the poem helps readers to feel the contrast between the speaker's lonely, hungry predicament and the happy security of the women around her.
The contrast between the speaker's too-light, "dangling basket" and the "heaped-up basket" the sisters Lilian and Lilias carry speaks for itself. But she also notices the beauty of the landscape itself—a beauty she can no longer take part in. When the sisters sing "sweet-voiced" beneath a lovely "sunset sky," the speaker can only feel the loveliness of the scene as a kind of mockery, reminding her she has no friends and no lover to share this time with. Her tempting picture of the "rosiest apples" in a nest of "green leaves" similarly suggests the pleasures and comforts of societally approved love, now forbidden to her.
It's even worse when she hears Willie's voice—one even "more sweet" to her than music—making its way through the "shadows cool." This image expresses the speaker's feelings through the landscape; the coolness of those shadows suggests both the chilling pain the speaker feels as she watches Willie walk past with another woman and Willie's chilly indifference to the speaker.
By the end of the poem, it seems as if the "chill" of both the coming night and the speaker's heart might prove fatal. As all her neighbors stroll past, remarking that it's getting cold out, she "loiter[s]" in the orchard. To this heartbroken speaker, this image suggests, it hardly matters whether she goes home or not; her whole life feels like freezing slowly to death now.
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Simile
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Rhetorical Question
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Repetition
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Enjambment
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Parallelism
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Alliteration
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Assonance
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Sibilance
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“An Apple Gathering” Vocabulary
Select any word below to get its definition in the context of the poem. The words are listed in the order in which they appear in the poem.
- Mine
- In due season
- The self-same track
- Jeer
- Stooped
- Hastened
- Loitered
Mine-
My.
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Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme of “An Apple Gathering”
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Form
"An Apple Gathering" is broken into seven quatrains (or four-line stanzas) with an alternating rhyme scheme. This steady, familiar stanza form gives the poem the flavor of an old ballad, a lament over lost love. This speaker seems to be fitting her pain into a timeworn tradition: she's neither the first woman nor the last, the poem's form suggests, to sit alone and heartbroken after a lover's betrayal.
But while folk songs usually use a steady meter, the irregular line lengths here break the poem's stride, reminding readers that the speaker's heartbreak still feels fresh, raw, and all too personal.
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Meter
"An Apple Gathering" uses its changing meter to evoke the speaker's heartbreak. The first three lines of each stanza are written in steady iambic pentameter: that is, they're built from five iambs, metrical feet with a da-DUM rhythm. Here's how that sounds in line 1:
I plucked | pink blos- | soms from | mine ap- | ple-tree
This familiar rhythm (it's one of the most common in English-language poetry) feels lulling as a steady heartbeat. But at the end of each stanza, the speaker breaks the pattern with a truncated line of iambic trimeter—only three iambs, as in line 4:
I found | no ap- | ples there.
That broken-off line mirrors the speaker's shock: stunned by romantic betrayal and a failed apple crop, she, like the meter, is brought up short.
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Rhyme Scheme
"An Apple Gathering" uses this alternating rhyme scheme:
ABAB
This singsong pattern often turns up in folk songs and ballads. By using a familiar, musical old rhyme scheme, the speaker makes her heartbreak sound like just one more catastrophe in the long history of romantic disaster: she's neither the first nor the last person to sing of her sorrow.
But those neat rhymes also sit uneasily next to the poem's cut-short meter, reminding readers that, to the speaker, this story isn't just a sad old song: it's an all-too-immediate tale of heartbreak.
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“An Apple Gathering” Speaker
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The poem's speaker is a heartbroken young woman who seems to have made some mistakes in love. Plucking symbolic apple blossoms too early, she finds herself with no apples later on. In other words, she might have given too much love, too soon to her former boyfriend "Willie," only for him to abandon her and leave her with no "harvest." Perhaps, readers suspect, she slept with him (or was otherwise physically intimate) early on—a huge taboo in the Victorian world this poem was written in.
While the poem's speaker is in some senses a stock character—the Heartbroken Young Woman—the details she gives about her predicament make this poem feel personal. She knows all the names of the people who go past her, and suffers from their mockery; having given up a secure "harvest," she's become an outcast, and no one seems to have any sympathy for her.
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“An Apple Gathering” Setting
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"An Apple Gathering" is set in an apple orchard near what seems to be a small country town—a place where all the inhabitants know each other by name. The speaker recognizes all the people who pass her by and knows where they live and what their story is. Sadly for her, they seem to know her whole story, too, and they cruelly smirk at her and her symbolically empty apple basket.
In fact, the poem's whole setting feels pretty symbolic. The "orchard" in which these apples grow seems like the land of love itself: a place that can either provide a bounteous harvest of fruit or a whole lot of withered nothing.
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Literary and Historical Context of “An Apple Gathering”
Literary Context
Christina Rossetti (1830-1894) was one of the most important poets of the Victorian era. A popular writer of strange and fantastical poems, Rossetti contributed to a growing 19th-century vogue for fairy tales and old romances. This poem first appeared in her 1862 collection Goblin Market and Other Poems, the title poem of which tells the tale of two sisters' sinister adventures in fairyland.
Rossetti was associated with the Pre-Raphaelites, an artistic movement dedicated to recapturing the beauty of a (much-mythologized and romanticized) Middle Ages; her brother Dante Gabriel Rossetti, a founder of the group known as the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, was also an accomplished painter and poet.
Many of Rossetti's contemporaries saw her as a successor to Elizabeth Barrett Browning, the wildly popular and famous poet of Sonnets from the Portuguese. Like Browning, Rossetti wrote movingly about her inner life (and had a fondness for Italy—Browning because she moved there, Rossetti because she was half-Italian). But Rossetti's poetry often followed a wilder and weirder path than Browning's, exploring visions both dreamy and nightmarish. Perhaps Rossetti's contemporaries mostly associated her with Browning because the two were those rarest of Victorian birds: celebrated, successful, widely-read poets who also happened to be women.
Today, Rossetti is often remembered as a proto-feminist figure for her poetry's explorations of women's hopes, sufferings, and desires—and the ways in which male shortsightedness and cruelty can smash women's lives. This poem, with its tale of a young woman ruined by love, is one example among many.
Historical Context
Alongside writers like Elizabeth Barrett Browning and George Eliot, Rossetti was part of a 19th-century upswelling of women's voices. Many women writers of the Victorian era struggled to find a place for themselves in a rigidly sexist society that saw women more as men's possessions than as independent people. "George Eliot," for instance, was the masculine pen name of one Mary Ann Evans, a mask that helped open the difficult door to publication in a world that mostly wanted women to keep quiet.
Not only were respectable Victorian women not expected to become writers, but they also weren't expected to do much besides get married and have children. As this poem's plot suggests, 19th-century Englishwomen were expected to be modest, virtuous, and chaste. Premarital sex was considered a major sin, and might easily ruin a woman's life. (Victorian men, on the other hand, could mostly do what they pleased.)
Poems like this one—in which a young woman is mocked and shunned after her lover abandons her for another woman—reflect Rossetti's complex feelings about the gender politics of her time. On the one hand, the poem seems to suggest that its speaker might indeed have made a mistake in picking her "blossoms" too early; on the other, the speaker has clearly been hard done by!
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More “An Apple Gathering” Resources
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External Resources
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The Poem Aloud — Listen to a reading of the poem.
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A Brief Biography — Learn more about Rossetti's life and work at the British Library's website.
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Rossetti and Gender — Read an article exploring Rossetti's reflections on being a woman (and writing as a woman) in the Victorian era.
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More of Rossetti's Poetry — Visit the Poetry Foundation to find more poems by Rossetti.
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LitCharts on Other Poems by Christina Rossetti
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