Margaret Page Hood's "The Spice Apple" tells a whole life in thirteen lines, using nothing more elaborate than three pieces of fruit. The setup sounds like a fairy tale: life hands a woman three apples, and what she does with each one decides what she is left with at the end. The poem is small and domestic, but its question is large. What do you do with the chances you are given, and what can still be made from whatever remains?
The first apple is "too green," and the woman tosses it "over the moon in her childish play." The phrasing is lovely and a little reckless. Throwing something over the moon is the kind of gesture only a child makes, careless because it assumes there will always be more. The poem doesn't scold her for it. The play is "childish" in the plain sense, and the lost apple stands for the early opportunities we waste simply because we are too young to know they are opportunities.
The second apple fails in the opposite direction. It is "too perfect," and she holds it "so dear" that she never eats it. Here the poem turns from carelessness to fear. The rhyme does quiet work: "dear" and "fear" sit together at the line endings, so that the very act of cherishing something is bound up with being afraid of it. This is the apple of the person who saves the good china for an occasion that never comes. Perfection, the poem implies, is a kind of trap, because something too precious to touch can never be enjoyed. The word "dared" is telling, since the problem is not that she doesn't want the apple but that she is too frightened to have it.
The third apple is where the poem slows down and gets richer. Hood spends four lines describing it, against one or two for each of the others, and her language darkens: "wizened and wrinkled and old." The three adjectives pile up like the wrinkles themselves. This fruit is the kind the autumn wind, "ruthless and cold," shakes from "the highest bough" and flings down, "idly defiant." That last phrase is the most interesting in the poem. The wind is casual, almost bored, yet also defiant, as if throwing the apple down were an act of rebellion. It is also a reminder that this is not an apple anyone chose, just as old age is not chosen. It arrives, and it is not pretty.
What the woman does with it is the poem's real turn. She sets it on the fireplace shelf and sticks it "richly full of the spice of herself." The image seems to evoke a pomander, the old household practice of studding fruit with cloves so that it perfumes a room. The wording is ambiguous in a productive way: the spice is "of herself," so she is not decorating the apple with something bought but pressing her own experience, her own character, into it. The adverb "richly" is generous after the bare, bitter vocabulary of the apple's appearance. What was shriveled becomes fragrant.
The ending is gentle but not simple: "The perfume of memories scented the air / And she dreamed that her youth and her love were still there." The word "dreamed" keeps the consolation honest. The poem does not claim that age restores what was lost, only that memory, given something to hold on to, can fill a room with the feeling of it. The couplet's rhyme of "air" and "there" closes the poem with a soft finality, like a door being pulled shut on a warm room.
Formally, Hood keeps things light. The lines are short and mostly rhymed in couplets, and the rhythm bounces in a way that suits the nursery-tale opening, then loosens and lengthens as the third apple takes over. The shape of the poem mirrors its argument: quick dismissals for the wasted chances, then a slow, lingering look at the one worth working with.
What makes the poem worth reading is its refusal of easy moralizing. Neither of the first two apples is condemned, and the third is not magically transformed into something beautiful. The woman simply does the one thing she can: she makes use of what is left, and puts herself into it.