The Apple Orchard
The Apple Orchard - meaning Summary
Quiet Persistence and Fruit
Rilke’s poem uses a twilight walk through an apple orchard as an extended image of human life. Memories and hopes surface as the speaker observes branches bowed with mature fruit. The trees’ patient, uncomplaining bearing of heavy loads becomes a model for committed living: quietly growing, enduring strain, and ultimately giving oneself by producing fruit. The tone is contemplative and didactic rather than narrative.
Read Complete AnalysesCome let us watch the sun go down and walk in twilight through the orchard's green. Does it not seem as if we had for long collected, saved and harbored within us old memories? To find releases and seek new hopes, remembering half-forgotten joys, mingled with darkness coming from within, as we randomly voice our thoughts aloud wandering beneath these harvest-laden trees reminiscent of Durer woodcuts, branches which, bent under the fully ripened fruit, wait patiently, trying to outlast, to serve another season's hundred days of toil, straining, uncomplaining, by not breaking but succeeding, even though the burden should at times seem almost past endurance. Not to falter! Not to be found wanting! Thus must it be, when willingly you strive throughout a long and uncomplaining life, committed to one goal: to give yourself! And silently to grow and to bear fruit.
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