What I know for sure about Eudora Welty’s short story collection, The Golden Apples, is that each story is filled with symbolism, sexual and mythical, and that the better part of it goes over my head. The stories are strange and mystical, while being at the same instant earthy and unpretentious. I’m pretty sure you could study these stories closely and write a doctoral thesis on them and still not know everything Welty is saying or implying.

The collection is built around the poem The Song of Wandering Aengus by W. B. Yeats.

I went out to the hazel wood,
Because a fire was in my head,
And cut and peeled a hazel wand,
And hooked a berry to a thread;
And when white moths were on the wing,
And moth-like stars were flickering out,
I dropped the berry in a stream
And caught a little silver trout.

When I had laid it on the floor
I went to blow the fire aflame,
But something rustled on the floor,
And some one called me by my name:
It had become a glimmering girl
With apple blossom in her hair
Who called me by my name and ran
And faded through the brightening air.

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.


In the poem, the narrator searches for the mythical beauty represented by the girl; Welty’s characters are searching as well, for beauty, for meaning, for a place to fit, for something greater in life. Each story builds upon the last in a cycle of revelations, but little is clearly stated and sometimes the true events and results of one story are not revealed until the next.

I would like to say I loved this collection, but perhaps I am growing lazy in my old age: it just required me to work too hard to get to the meaning and then left me feeling that I had probably missed at least half of it anyway.

I loved the poem!
( )

Golden Apples is a novel by Eudora Welty that reads like a series of bizarre short stories with the same recurring characters set in a fictional town in Mississippi. Some readers may find it difficult because of its use of language (specifically nigger). Others may find it difficult just for it's odd prose. The chapters are not linear nor are obvious segues ever used to cue the reader in that a jump in time has taken place. There are also lots of characters with similar names making it easy to lose track of who has done what, when. If I were more drawn into the book I'd want to reread it to get the pieces I missed or misunderstood but frankly I'm just not captivated enough to want to do that right now. ( )

Una colección de relatos que conforman un conjunto que describen el paso del tiempo contemplado desde la perspectivas de distintas familias que ocupan un lugar común, la ciudad imaginaria de Morgana, situada en Mississippi. ( )