'A Solitary Orgy By the Fire'

“I never could find any poetry in gathering apples. It is the worst work I know except washing dishes and listening to a debate.” 

While being true to his instincts and taste, and, incidentally, inventing an anti-romantic countertradition in American poetry, Edwin Arlington Robinson shunned the folksy, flowery and hackneyed. No proletarian – he seems without politics --  he knew and respected work and workers. Irving Howe described Robinson as “the first American poet of stature to bring commonplace people and commonplace experience into our poetry.” His people are clerks, farmers and butchers, and his poems are often short stories about their lives, Sherwood Anderson minus the Freudian rubbish. At the top, Robinson is writing a letter to his friend Harry de Forest Smith on this date, October 7, in 1894. He is twenty-four and still years away from writing his best poems.

 

As a subject for poetry, apple picking invites wholesome Yankee-magazine quaintness. It’s probably best avoided as a theme, though Frost in “After Apple-Picking” did a respectable job. For Robinson, apples are not props but familiar elements of Maine scenery. Among his childhood chores in Gardiner was picking apples in his family’s orchard. They show up periodically in the poems, as in what may be his finest single work, “Isaac and Archibald” (Captain Craig: A Book of Poems, 1902). Archibald speaks first, followed by the narrator, a boy who knew the elderly title characters:   

 

“He said: ‘The orchard now’s the place for us;

We may find something like an apple there,

And we shall have the shade, at any rate.’

So there we went and there we laid ourselves

Where the sun could not reach us; and I champed

A dozen of worm-blighted astrakhans

While Archibald said nothing.”

 

According to Scott Donaldson in Edwin Arlington Robinson: A Poet’s Life (Columbia University Press, 2007), the poet loved apples – eating them, not picking:

 

“He conceived a passion for apples early. Inspired by the fruits of the family orchard and the ‘sopsy-vine’ produce of the Jordans’ tree across the street. He had his particular favorites, among them firm, juicy Northern Spies and Baldwins, Seek-no-Farthers, and Gravensteins. ‘I remember one rainy afternoon, the deuce knows how long ago,’ he wrote in November 1899, ‘when I went down to the orchard with a tin pail and an umbrella and got Gravensteins. When I got back I washed off the dried grass and the mud and had a solitary orgy by the fire. After I had eaten about ten I began to blow scales on [brother Dean’s] clarinet. I have not a doubt that I had an enormous supper that night  and read The Raven with unaccustomed force.'”