Risa Bear’s “Wassail” opens with a small shock of seasonal timing: “In August, but this year in July, Gravensteins.” That early arrival matters, but the poem’s real subject is the quiet ceremony of using the harvest well. A woman moves through the old tasks—cooking apples into butter, shredding and pressing them, bottling juice, starting cider—and the poem treats that labor not as drudgery but as a domestic form of blessing. Though the title names the orchard rite of wassailing, the blessing here is performed more with knives, crocks, burlap, and glass than with song until the final line.
The verse has no fixed meter or rhyme; it moves in long, conversational lines that stretch and break according to the rhythm of the work. Lists of apple varieties—“the old Egremont Russet, Cortland, / Honeycrisp and Jonagold”—create a cumulative, almost incantatory momentum, as if naming the fruit is part of tending it. Enjambment often carries a sentence past a line break exactly the way one task flows into the next: “will make / six pints and one short jelly jar. After // that, the old Egremont Russet...” The pause after “After” even mimics the breath between batches. Within that loose structure, small sonic touches hold the language together: “golden fleshed, generous, kind to cook, / ciderer and ring-dryer” bristles with internal rhyme and alliteration, making the apple itself feel companionable and full of purpose.
The poem’s imagery is saturated with gold. The Gravensteins are “golden fleshed,” and later, at evening, “she dips gold” as the pressed juice is poured through filter and funnel into waiting quarts. The repetition turns liquid into light and work into alchemy. The sensory details are precise and unromantic: “peeled rings, quartered, lightly cloved, / cinnamoned and nutmegged” conjure the warm, spiced kitchen, while the press involves a “dedicated shredder,” a burlap bag, a tub, and “her father’s pulley / and old hemp rope.” That word “dedicated” matters—it suggests devotion, a tool set apart for this annual task. So does the inherited pulley and rope, which quietly tie the woman’s labor to an earlier generation. The poem does not need to announce continuity; it hangs the harvest from a maple branch with old hemp, and the connection is simply there.
Precision runs through the whole process. The apple butter will make “six pints and one short jelly jar,” and the juice will fill “forty-five glass jars or more, most years.” Those exact numbers are not incidental; they are a record of knowing how much the trees give and what the kitchen can hold. The phrase “most years” keeps the count modest, aware that seasons vary. Even the calendar is elastic, as the opening line shows. Yet within that variation, the method is steady: slice, shred, press, hang, wait, pour, seal. Time slows in the middle of the poem—“Juice will run for hours, collecting / in a tub beneath”—and the reader is invited to wait with it. The final task, making cider in a cool jug with wine yeast, is mentioned almost offhandedly: “Last, she’ll think of cider (but not too much).” That parenthetical captures the poem’s tone—practical, measured, not overly solemn.
The ending leaps forward: “In seven days or less she will sing to trees.” This is the only literal reference to wassailing, the old custom of saluting orchard trees to encourage a good crop. But by now the reader understands that the song is not separate from the peeling, pressing, and bottling. All of that patient work has been a form of singing. Risa Bear’s poem makes ordinary domestic labor feel significant because it is precise, inherited, and tied to the seasons. It does not glorify the work; it simply pays attention, and attention becomes ritual. The golden liquid in the jars, the cool jug fermenting under the house, the old pulley hanging from the maple—each is a note in the orchard’s longer song.