Oh To Be A Girl Peeling Apples

This poem feels impersonal at first, simply describing the girl and making visual connections to both the girl and the apples, yet when you move toward the end, Salter seems to paint the apple and the actions of peeling and prepping the apples as more. She relates the deconstruction of said apples to the “…spiral/ of making while unmaking while/ the world goes round” creating depth and search for more meaning to life. The simple irony of being able to create something through the breaking down of said individual item, tends to be almost metaphorical to the idea of you can only create beauty out of destruction, such as a phoenix rising from the ashes-eque pattern of thought. As Salter moves form the imagery of the girl and the peeling of apples, we see a more violent comparison of a knife to a paintbrush with “…just as he/ who has/painted her at her knife/ paints the brush that puts life/ in her, apple of his eye…” which ties back to the idea of beauty through violence and pain of some kind. “…her knife/ paints the brush that puts life in her…” seems to be the representation of beauty literally being carved out and created in someone. “…Apple of his eye” coming directly after this line helps create this sense that to be prized in his eye, she must be created and broken apart in some way to be this prize almost. After listening to the poem on https://poetryarchive.org/poem/young-girl-peeling-apples/, she prefaces the reading with stating the poem was about a painting at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. As I look at the poem again with this knowledge, I can tell that not only was I using somewhat of a New Criticism lens to analyze the personal versus impersonal, as I was attempting to make meaning through the text and simply what it has to offer. Knowing the Salter deliberately wrote this about a painting makes a forced distinction that the poem cannot be unto itself. After both looking at the painting and rereading the poem“…just as he/ who has/painted her at her knife/ paints the brush that puts life/ in her, apple of his eye…” is quite literally the man who painted the young girl, as she is staring at the apples and peeling them in the painting, he is staring at her on the canvas and painting his own depiction of a maid in a soft and kind light. https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/436934

Salter begins the poem with a traditional left margin stanza. As she introduces the idea of an apple, she then forms each stanza in almost apple form, starting with a short first line that is in the middle, a longer second line that is slightly more left justified than the first, moving in to the fully left justified third line which is presented shorter than the second, using a slightly indented fourth line, tying up the stanza with a fifth line which is indented more than the fourth yet not more than the second. Although the right side of the poem is less formed to this shape, it loosely follows the same form, having a few lines throughout the poem that fall out of pattern.

Punctuation is interesting in this poem, as there is one period, making this poem one long sentence. She uses colons, commas, and dashes throughout to help string these stanzas into her apples that she is peeling. Her use of the semicolon allows for pauses throughout the poem, all which do not come at the end of a stanza, but rather sprinkled throughout. Her use of free verse is tied to this, creating a string of thoughts and ideas that are not put together in a rhyming scheme or specific pattern. Listening to the poem on the poetry archive, I could hear how natural and flowing she created it, almost flowing like a steady river to the next idea. It is not rushed or pushed, but a steady beat of a drum. There is a calmness and steadiness to her words, where she is pushing you forward but never stopping until the end, where she uses her one and only period, creating an end to her river of thoughts.