golden apples of the sun

on transformation and pursuit of the beloved

Hera's orchard has a single tree that grows at the setting point of the sun. Its golden apples are guarded by a hundred-headed dragon and tended by the Hesperides, twilight nymphs of golden light, daughters of the evening. I was imagining the Hesperides when I took an apple out into the dawn.

I was newly 17 and visiting my aunt in Central Florida after spending a week at Catholic Musical Theater Camp. There, a boy with shaggy hair and a guitar scrawled lyrics he'd written about me in his prayer journal and presented them to me solemnly after a performance of Godspell. 

In the wake of the gift, I found myself alert and barefoot in the dark, standing in front of my aunt's bookshelf, picking volumes of poetry from the shelves like fruit, filling my arms, and slipping onto an open futon where a large black dog I'd known since childhood lay sleeping. I opened a collection of Irish poetry with a pale green cover and read, for the first of many times, "The Song of the Wandering Aengus," a three-stanza poem by William Butler Yeats and published in his 1899 collection The Wind Among the Reeds. 

Aengus is a mythical Irish figure who falls in love with a girl he only sees in his dreams. He can only keep her in his waking life if he can identify her while she's transfigured among swans. 

First printed in a magazine under the title "The Mad Song," Yeats’s poem tells the story of a man who catches a trout one morning. As he's preparing a fire, the fish transforms into "a glimmering girl / With apple blossom in her hair," who calls him by name before turning and disappearing into the morning. I whispered the poem aloud. The sun was thinking of rising. The black dog was starting to stir. 

It ends like this: 

Though I am old with wandering

Through hollow lands and hilly lands,

I will 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.

I left the book open on the futon and found myself immediately running toward the yard with an apple foraged from the kitchen counter, out into the dark to eat the fruit in the dampness of the previous night's storm. The dog followed, and I sat beneath an orange tree and sank my teeth into the apple, placing myself under the tree like the Hesperides, thinking of Atlas holding up the sky. 

I wanted mystical transformation. I wanted a quest. I thought of the boy with the shaggy hair and the prayer journal and the guitar, only because I was still under the narrow impression that all such pursuits come in the shape of a man. I ate the apple slowly, wanting a love that would transfix me, and kept going when I got to the core. I ate it: seeds, stem, and all. 

That summer, I saw golden apples everywhere. I saw them bobbing on the lake's surface and hanging from the trees in the grocery store parking lot. I drew them in my notebooks at school that fall, and on my saddle oxfords. At some point that year, the image quieted, and the apples lay buried like a seed in me for 20 years. 

Apples, Paul Cézanne, 1878–79

The golden apple appears repeatedly in myth and legend. It is a gift, a reward, the beginning of a quest, the beginning of a conflict. 

Heracles retrieves them as his eleventh labor. Eris tosses a golden apple inscribed to the fairest among the goddesses seated at a wedding banquet, thus sowing the seeds of the Trojan War. 

In Norse mythology, the goddess Idun possesses golden apples that preserve the immortality of the gods, and in Gaelic traditions, the enchanted silver bough with golden apples belongs to the sea god Manannán mac Lir.   

"The Golden Bird" by The Brothers Grimm begins like this: "A certain king had a beautiful garden, and in the garden stood a tree which bore golden apples." In the story, the golden apples are stolen by a golden bird. There is a prince on a quest, an advice-wielding fox, golden feathers, golden horses, golden saddles, a golden princess. 

Il pomo d'oro (The Golden Apple) was an opera staged over two days in 1668 in an open-air theater in Vienna to mark the 17th birthday of Empress Margaret Theresa. A marvel of stage design, it featured gods and chariots emerging from ruins, towers crumbling, and sinking ships. Set pieces transformed hellmouths into pleasure gardens. At the end of the performance, an actor turned toward the audience and awarded the young Empress the golden apple to signify her place as the most beautiful, the most beloved. 

And in the Yeats poem, we are given in the final line golden apples of the sun—treasures worth seeking, the fruits of transformation.  

Quince in the Bonnefont Herb Garden at The Cloisters, July 2024

Last week, I left Brooklyn and ventured to northern Manhattan to visit The Cloisters, which houses the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Medieval collection. Aside from the unicorn tapestries, my favorite feature of the Cloisters is its gardens. 

The Bonnefont Herb Garden overlooks the Hudson River and contains plants Charlemagne ordered grown on his properties in the ninth century. The beds in this garden are labeled by use: the Medicinal Bed, the Household Bed, the Love and Fertility Bed, the Magic Bed. At the center of the garden is a marble cistern surrounded by four quince trees with gnarled and low branches, their fruit pale and green in July.  

I was standing in the garden reading about quinces—skin, flesh, core, seed, stem, what it takes for budding after dormancy, when new growth begins, how to thin out the canopy to allow for light and air—when I heard a woman behind me say, "They turn gold in October. They look just like golden apples."  

Something knocked loose in me. A door fell open, and I was in the garden of the Hesperides. The seed in my chest became an apple blossom, and I was 17 again, tracing golden apples on my thigh in metallic gel ink. It was as if this woman had touched my shoulder and said, Remember? There's a quest if you want it. 

The Garden of the Hesperides, Frederick, Lord Leighton, 1892

I left the quince trees and the Bonnefont Herb Garden, and a few days later, I turned 37. The night before my birthday, I dreamt I was kneeling at the edge of a wooden basin, bobbing for golden fruit in cool, dark water. I filled my lungs and plunged, braced myself against the shock of the cold, and scraped my teeth against apple skin, trying to pluck a prize—knowledge, a path, a taste of something sweet.  

Later that morning, my son offered me a birthday gift: a story he wrote about a mother who has never really seen the world and sets off to travel for the first time. In Ireland, she finds an antique falconer's glove in a shop near an old castle. An old woman insists to the mother that she will need the glove. And, of course, the mother is soon visited by a giant falcon, an ancient god of change who will take her wherever she wants. The bird will protect her, but the mother must decide where she wants to go. 

Where does the mother want to go?

Last week, I heard Lyn Slater, author of How to Be Old, speak about reinvention. She spoke of the unlimited opportunities to reinvent ourselves and called the moment before transformation the What Nowness. The first thing to do, she said, is to ask questions like What gives me pleasure? What am I curious about? The next step is to place yourself in an environment or among people where you can explore those pleasures or curiosities without concern about the outcome. We must act in pursuit of who we will become.

Maybe this is a truth that everyone must discover for herself—that she is both the lover and the beloved, both Aengus and the glimmering girl, that transformation is ours to be had whenever we wish, that we can become old with wandering in the span three stanzas and still go out in restless pursuit at dawn. 

Sitting in the community garden eating apples while my children climb the cherry tree at its center, I can't shake the sense that I've gone on ahead of myself, that I've stolen off somewhere through the open door into morning and am being asked to run in pursuit.

Mid-July and the apples in the basket by the window seem to glow, tempting and ancient. I have new questions: What makes you feel luminous? Which fruits does the body lurch toward? Everything feels floral and sharp, waiting to be made different, waiting to be made new. I hear my name called and turn, catching a glimpse of something strange and wonderful, sweet and fruitful as an orchard in full bloom. 

P.S. A few notes before I leave you: 

🌸 Here's Johnny Flynn's "Wandering Aengus" to accompany this piece. Judy Collins, Donovan, and other artists have also set the poem to music. 

🌸 We've just kicked off seven weeks of a Summer of Creative Joy at the London Writers' Salon. We'd love to have you join us! 

🌸 Here's the Yeats poem in its entirety. I very heartily recommend reading it aloud. 

🌸 I'll be quiet here while disappearing into my book for a while, but I'll see you in August. Tell me in the comments below how you're doing, what you're reading, and if you're on a summer quest. 

With love and gratitude, 

Lindsey