The poem's heroine is a 'fallen' woman; one deemed unworthy by society, usually as a result of sexual experience outside marriage. The dominant metaphor is of apples as the symbol of temptation and premature self-indulgence, a biblical allusion to the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge that Eve tasted in Genesis, the temptation that resulted in the Fall of Man. Apples - it was medieval iconology that associated the apple with original sin