Rilke’s “The Fruit Carrier,” second poem of “Les Trois Porteuses”

Carl Christian Constantin Hansen, Girl with Fruit in a Basket (The painting is found in many places on the web.)

The second poem in Rilke’s sequence “Trois Porteuses” is a bit of puzzle. Here I will be working out an understanding of the poem.

La Porteuse de Fruits
Voici ce que c’est que l’année.
Si ronds que vous soyez, vous n’êtes pas les têtes:
on vous a pensés là-bas, o fruits achevés,
les hivers ont imaginés, calculés,
dans les racines et sous l’écorce des troncs
(à la lampe).
Mais sans doute êtes-vous plus beaux
que tous ces projets, o vous, les œuvres aimées.
Et moi, je vous porte. Votre poids
me rend plus sérieuses que je ne suis.
J’exprime malgré moi je ne sais quel regret
semblable à celui de la fiancée étonnée
lorsqu’elle s’en va embrasser,
une à une, ses pales amies d’enfance.
  
The Fruit Carrier
This is what the year is all about.
Though round you may be, you are not heads:
we thought of you there, o ripe fruits,
the winters imagined you, calculated you,
in the roots and under the bark of the trunks
(by lamplight).
But you are probably more beautiful
than all those plans, o you, the beloved works.
And it’s I who carries you. Your weight
makes me more serious than I am.
Despite myself, I express some regret
like that of the astonished fiancée
when she goes to kiss,
one by one, her pale childhood friends. 

Like “The Flower Carrier,” this poem is a dramatic monologue. The speaker’s first, challenging line—“This is what the year is all about”—is key to understanding all that follows, including the next, puzzling line: “Though round you may be, you are not heads,” a line we come to understand as addressing the fruit she’s carrying. Here my knowledge of idiomatic French may fail me; as in English, lettuce is described as a head (tête de laitue), but fruit isn’t, so far as I know. But whatever wordplay Rilke may be using here, the point becomes clear in the next four lines: in the winter, we used our heads—“we thought of you,” “the winters imagined you, calculated you” by lamplight—to make plans (projets) for the coming harvest. The passage from winter to summer, from hope to reality, is the year.

The plans of winter are “probably” (sans doute) less beautiful than the picked fruit in the carrier's basket. The works of summer--les œuvres aimées—are beloved in a way mere plans and projects, the immediate results of thinking and calculation, cannot be.

“The Flower Carrier” ends with the speaker imagining that her beloved calls her light (Légère). In “The Fruit Carrier,” the weight of the fruit she carries makes the speaker both heavy and serious, in both English and French the opposite of light / légère: Votre poids / me rend plus sérieuses que je ne suis (Your weight / makes me more serious than I am).

The surprising simile at the end of the poem reminds us of “The Flower Carrier” who sits obediently beside the man to whom she’s given her hands. Bearing the weight of the fruit gives the fruit carrier a sense of regret, like that of a fiancée bidding farewell to her childhood as she kisses her childhood friends.  

Fruit is considered a human endeavor—the object of plans and calculations, realized in works (œuvres) that induce emotions resembling those accompanying a change in social status, from unmarried to married. What remains of nature is perhaps the vague regret felt by the speaker. But nature is contained within human categories and concerns. I am reminded of those formal Renaissance gardens, where well-pruned orange trees grew in round pots held by horizontal balustrades in a walled garden that served as another room in the house. (I’m paraphrasing Ruth Wedgewood Kennedy, The Renaissance Painter’s Garden (Oxford, 1948), 4.)

Posted 23 January 2025 in Nashville, TN. Send comments to [email protected]