When you use the words "the apple" or "the peach" you are representing a thing.  Neither is a very specific thing, yet both are visual things compared, for example, to the word "fruit," which is informational only and which the reader will understand, but from which no particular image can form.

        If you drop the article and use the word alone--"apple" or "peach"--you are moving away from the direction of a particular and toward the abstract.  Once again, the reader can visualize "the apple" or "an apple" but "apple" is only a word meaning any or all apples--it is not a thing.  Thus it is unseeable, it vanishes from the realm of the imagined real.  The world is full of sensory detail.  The poem needs this sensory detail also.

        When one writes "the last apple on the tree," or "the one small peach as pink as dawn," one is beginning to deal with particulars--to develop texture.

        This is a good moment to read Elizabeth Bishop's poem "The Fish."  There are metaphors and similes in the poem.  Also there is texture--the poet gives the reader a plenitude of details concerning the fish, and this texture is vital to the poem. Such texture is vital to all poetry.  It is what makes the poem an experience, something much more than a statement.

Click here to read Elizabeth Bishop's "The Fish."