Tough, ruby red skin peeled back to reveal jewels of blood tucked neatly in their pockets. You pop them out like loose teeth, your fingers stained pink from the fruit of your labor.
The image of the pomegranate has circulated through nearly every branch of culture–literature, religion, myth, and now the internet. Taking every form, the fruit has been used as a symbol of fertility, a test of love, a marker of transformation, and a metaphor for consumption.
You would think that after centuries of reuse, we might grow tired of the image, and yet it persists. I recently fell into a pomegranate rabbit hole on TikTok, reading poems, revisiting myths, and scrolling endlessly through the #pomegranate. The fruit is everywhere. Even as I write this, I’ll admit, a pomegranate screensaver rests behind my Google window.
At what point, however, does an image become oversaturated?
Greek Mythology
In Greek mythology, the pomegranate functions as a symbol of both fertility and captivity. It appears most famously in the myth of Persephone and Hades, in which Hades, the god of the underworld, abducts Persephone. Before she can return to her mother, Demeter, she eats six pomegranate seeds offered to her by Hades. In doing so, she binds herself to the underworld, and it is decided that she must return for six months of each year. During Persephone’s absence, Demeter’s grief causes the earth to wither, bringing winter to the human world.
Interpretations of this myth hinge on Persephone’s agency. Some readings suggest that she willingly eats the seeds, choosing love. Others, however, argue that she is tricked and trapped against her will. The pomegranate, then, can be simultaneously a symbol of eternal love and temptation, but also of imprisonment and a loss of autonomy.
Religion
The pomegranate appears again in religious texts, often echoing its associations with desire and intimacy. In the Song of Songs of the Old Testament, the fruit marks the maturation of love:
“Let us go early to the vineyards
to see if the vines have budded,
if their blossoms have opened,
and if the pomegranates are in bloom–
there I will give you my love.”
Here, the pomegranate functions as a temporal marker, signaling ripeness not just of fruit, but of devotion. Love unfolds alongside the natural world, reinforcing the pomegranate’s long-standing role as a symbol of sensuality and connection.
Consumption
The pomegranate’s symbolism also often veers into the visceral. Its thick skin must first be torn apart in order to reach the red juice inside, inviting comparisons to flesh and blood. This has tied the fruit to traditions of cannibalistic or vampiric imagery, where consumption becomes an act of desire.
In Midnight Sun, the fifth book of the Twilight series, Edward explicitly compares himself and Bella to Hades and Persephone. As a vampire, Edward’s love gets intertwined with hunger, and the pomegranate becomes a metaphor for his temptation and restraint.
Digital Influence
Most recently, the pomegranate has found a new life on the internet. On TikTok, videos circulate of pomegranates split open, their juice staining book pages red. These images are often paired with poetic captions, the most popular I’ve seen reading: “Pomegranates are so beautiful and worth the mess. Maybe I’m beautiful and worth the mess too.” I’ve seen small creators post similar poems, echoing the same language, the same metaphors, and the same slow-motion shots of juice-stained fingers.
Eating a pomegranate has also become a test of love online. Much like the “orange theory,” the “pomegranate theory” suggests that if someone is willing to deseed a pomegranate for you–a tedious, staining task–they would do anything for you.
Other videos frame the fruit as a metaphor for love styles, often reinforcing gender stereotypes: a woman’s love is careful and gentle, producing a clean bowl of seeds, while a man’s love is rough and animalistic, leaving splattered countertops and torn flesh.
Afterlife
Fruit has always been a fixture in art and literature–Wendy Cope’s oranges, Sylvia Plath’s figs–so it is no surprise that pomegranates have followed the same tradition. But at what point does repeated symbolism stop enriching our understanding and begin limiting it?
Perhaps the issue is not the pomegranate itself, but the conditions under which it now circulates. Algorithms feed us what is familiar, what performs well, what has already been proven meaningful. In that repetition, complexity is often flattened. A symbol becomes less an invitation to interpret and more a prompt to reproduce.
Still, literature has always been built from shared materials. Motifs recur, tropes reappear, and symbols are handed down and reshaped across centuries. We do not call love poems obsolete simply because love has been written about before. People have always been moved to follow patterns, to echo what resonates. To reach for an overused symbol is not necessarily a lack of imagination, but an attempt at connection–to speak in a language already known.
Social media may accelerate sameness, but it also gives people permission to write. TikTok, in particular, has given young poets a space to experiment publicly and share their work. Familiarity, then, is not inherently empty. Sometimes it is how people learn to speak at all.
Maybe the pomegranate endures because it offers something we recognize immediately–mess, desire, and sweetness earned through effort. The algorithm did not invent this hunger; it only learned how to feed it back to us. Symbols persist because people keep seeing their reflections in them. The question, then, is not whether the image can survive the algorithm, but whether we can slow down enough to notice why we are still reaching for it.