The poem 'After Apple Picking' by Robert Frost is one the most celebrated and widely read poems of the Romantic Period. The poem is set after the speaker has finished a seemingly ordinary day of apple picking, and is now halfway to sleep and dreaming. Dualism is replaced by an almost religious sense of unity here; and the tone of irony, quizzical reserve, completely disappears in favour of wonder and incantation. The phrase "two-pointed ladder" is itself less directly metaphorical than is "ladder road" of "Directive." The apple holds, against the authoritative prosodic erosion of waking reality into dream state, its own sensual place as an essential ingredient in the spell to which the speaker is succumbing. He has literally lost sight of all the values of the harvest. But I am done with apple-picking now. Labor, again, is both one of the unfortunate consequences of the Fall and a way of overcoming them, of transforming them into fortunate ones. As in much of Frost's prose the syntax here is aggressively vernacular and irregular, and the effect is to make the word "in" a part of the verb. . The easiness of voice movement and vocabulary in the poem will seem at odds with deeper possibilities only to those who do not share Frost's perception, following Emerson and Thoreau, that the possibilities are simply there to be encountered. The woodchuck could say whether it's like his In Frost, to use Frye's terms, action and awareness continually clash with each other in a way that ultimately prohibits the establishing of a lasting mythos. After Apple Picking As a Pastoral Poem The strain ‘After Apple Picking’ by Robert Frost is undivided the most exalted and widely recognize strains of the Romantic Date. It keeps the pressure of the ladder-round. Perhaps that is one reason why he is "overtired" of a harvest "I myself desired." Since the woodchuck surely could not ". It glows, its russet flecks showing clear and its scent in the air, as potent as Snow White's apple, while the ice mirror has broken and the speaker is moving toward a hibernatory trance. Ironically enough, only when he awakens will he know what sleep it is—or, rather, was. I skimmed this morning from the drinking trough Table of Contents Introduction…………………………………………………………………………3-7 Chapter 1. I got from looking through a pane of glass His awareness and fear of this loss of control are manifested in the final lines: The woodchuck could say whether it's like his The apple-picker (and Frost) seems almost reluctantly involved in these implications. Hardly an allegory either supporting or denouncing Christian doctrine, the work nonetheless relies on overtones of the Fall to enrich its complex meaning. Is it possible to read too much into the mysterious images in the poem, or do these images cry out for an interesting and creative interpretation? But if the speaker's dream and sleep exist in life, then to assert that, after his labors, the speaker "is now looking not into the world of effort but the world of dream, of the renewal," is to oversimplify the poem. A comparison between the dream and the activity is revealing for what the dream leaves out, and such a comparison must be based on the visual element in the dream, since all the other elements are ascribable to purely natural aftereffects and bear no symbolic relationship to the whole point of picking as many apples as possible: to reap a great harvest. Went surely to the cider-apple heap . Each phase of reminiscence or reflection forms a unit of syntax, all except two without a final stop within the unit; and each unit becomes in effect a stanza marked off by one or two rhyming 'seals.' His 'ladder's sticking through a tree'—which is accurate and earthy—but 'through a tree / Toward heaven.' "After Apple-Picking" is a poem by Robert Frost. Or just some human sleep. After a long day of picking apples, the speaker is tired. The progress or movement of analogy brings us to something beyond it, like faith or a belief. In these two lines tone and rhythm work together beautifully, implying a great deal in relation to Frost's metaphor. The symbolism of the 'great harvest' as the goals and dreams of the man links it back to the Primitivism and the experiences of the common man. Beside it, and there may be two or three. It both enables and distorts sight. He persists on the ladder, somehow failing to accept the biology of sleep (and the purpose of dreaming to keep us asleep), while other creatures have gone. That struck the earth, Deliberate mention of the detail, nonetheless, suggests his alienation from nature. . And it’s one my favorite poems to teach. It is characteristic of Frost that the 'sentencing' and the sense are surely controlled, that daylight accuracy and daylight humor are present in statement and tone. His ladder is pointed toward heaven only, and he has had to descend from it. The first section concludes with the speaker's commenting that he is no longer interested in picking apples, in appropriating nature to his own uses: "But I am done with apple-picking now." the laboring man . What he fears is not so much death as the very state the poem has mimicked - that is, a suspension between not-life and not-death where language is narcotized toward incoherence and uncontrol. My instep arch not only keeps the ache, Associated with the statement ". . ) By comparison, the ladder in "After Apple-Picking" is quite graphically vertical, and it points to a destination beyond itself. But in the world of "After Apple-Picking," recovery is not certain. Order, progress, and the harvest of knowledge are as much a part of the inextricable order of the garden as the great tree upon which we sway precariously: In such a casual phrase as "there may be two or three / Apples I didn't pick upon some bough" we feel the speaker's indifference toward perfection. The meaning implied by the self-hypnosis and dreamy confusion of rhythm is finely suggested in the image of 'the world of hoary grass,' the blurred seeing of morning that anticipates the night vision. They sell their products to education, consumer creative professional, business and government customers. I cannot rub the strangeness from my sight And every fleck of russet showing clear. . Copyright © 1996 by Jeffrey Meyers. Since the speaker's dream, according to this account, represents an ideal rooted in the real world, (his ability to dream about a job well done represents his heaven on earth. For Frost himself, the poem most likely is intended to describe his feelings about poetry, after writing it over a period of years. Copyright © 1994 by Cambridge University Press. The larger possibilities are made inextricable in our, and in his, experience from smaller, more detailed ones. Those suggestions become explicit in the contrast between the sleep of the woodchuck and "just some human sleep." They come together to create the theme of desires and significance in life. Frost mastered blank verse (i.e., unrhymed verse in iambic… I skimmed this morning from the drinking trough. Of load on load of apples coming in. This sleep of mine, whatever sleep it is. To settle for a purely naturalistic explanation of the relationship between the two, however, is to limit the poem. and he rhythmically sways on the ladder when the boughs bend with his weight. The scent of apples: I am drowsing off. . His sleep will be human precisely because it will be a disturbed, dream- and myth-ridden sleep. When the penetration of "facts" or of matter occurs through labor, the laborer, who may also be the poet, becomes vaguely aware that what had before seemed solid and unmalleable is also part of a collective "dream" and partakes of myth. But for readers concerned with the depth of the actual in Frost's poetry, such an explanation is hardly sufficient. Furthermore, they are all magnified; the distinction between those harvested and those lost does not exist. Since the word 'sleep' (10) has already occurred five times, it completes the rhyme and the poem with a special finality of sound and meaning. The two pointed ladder could be symbolic one point … Romantic poems also had a connection with the transcendent and links to the spiritual. The phrase could signify metaphor itself and reminds us that for Frost metaphor was the true source and method of all thinking. Sarah Gosa - When I read this poem it struck me as being about how when a person tries to go to sleep after doing something repetitive for a long time their mind and body is still holding on to the sensation. The closing metaphor of the poem, the woodchuck's 'long sleep,' adds to the strangeness of 'winter sleep' by bringing in the non-human death-like sleep of hibernation. The scent of apples: I am drowsing off. And held against the world of hoary grass. . These include, in this case, the discovery of the precarious balances whenever one season shifts to another, the exhaustions of the body, and the possible consequences of "falling," which are blemish and decay. Long sleep, as I describe its coming on, Frost's "feats of association" are so complicated, his performance in hinting so masterful, that the poem suggests the possibility of a third kind of sleep. . Presumably men do not go into physical hibernation for months. And as the speaker moves toward an increasing intuition of the symbolic underpinnings of his exhaustion, which is the result not just of his picking apples but of other more visceral frustrations and fears, the frequency of these variations increases. There is a sense of abundance-a large number of apples; and weariness, 'For I have had too much / Of apple picking; I am overtired/ Of the great harvest I myself desired'. Or just some human sleep. What is the nature of the trouble? The dramatic monologue, diction and modality shows the struggles of the man. . The poem begins with a happy tone. “After Apple-Picking” is about picking apples, but with its ladders pointing “[t]oward heaven still,” with its great weariness, and with its rumination on the harvest, the coming of winter, and inhuman sleep, the reader feels certain that the poem harbors some “ulteriority.” Copyright © 1973 by University Press of Mississippi. As of no worth. Unlike Jacob's, this ladder is a human construct that rests and depends on the tree and is left to nature as an artifact of human effort. The vivid pastoral sensory imagery in the poem emphasizes the image of an apple, ... Robert Frost’s, “After Apple-Picking”, is a poem about a dying old man who is looking back on his life, represented by apple picking, and of his regret for unaccomplished desires. Of course, since the ice is melting, the gesture is perfectly normal. Of apple-picking: I am overtired Essence of winter sleep is on the night, . The only explicitly metaphorical statement in the entire, highly metaphoric poem - the only time the apple-picker tries directly to generalize his experience ("One can see . There is word that people who hate Mac have not really had a moment of using. If nature can renew itself automatically, man, viewed as distinct from nature, cannot be assured of such renewal. . One of Frost’s earlier works, After Apple-Picking classifies him as a quaint, New England poet. In "After Apple-Picking," the ladder only points toward heaven. If the apple will fall in "After Apple Picking," if it, like the speaker on his way to dreaming, is about to go bruised to the cider heap where it will be pressed into an essence of itself, it nonetheless maintains through all its transmutations an identifiable appleness. After Apple Picking is the poem that links Frost heavily to the Romantic Tradition as he follows the traditional Romantic model, in which he displays a number of Romantic qualities, mainly a connection with the transcendent and spiritual, Individualism, Primitivism and Nature as a source of reflection and guidance. It is called a "great harvest," and while "great" can refer to numbers - "There were ten thousand thousand fruit to touch" - it soon begins to accumulate other than quantitative implications in its linkage to the word "cherish," the phrase "not let fall," and the reminder, in the suddenly exalted phrasing of "struck the earth" (when the word "ground" might have been used), that the ladder was pointed not at the "sky" but "toward heaven." 275. If his sleep is to be like nature's, what then is the point of the reference to the woodchuck? Apples I didn't pick upon some bough. By signing up, you'll get thousands of step-by-step solutions to your homework questions. 'Could tell' and 'was about to take' seem to refer both to the morning and to the present state of 'drowsing off.'. Not only do we think in metaphors that are contrived for the purpose, like "ladder road"', more than that, we cannot so much as use a word or a phrase without committing ourselves, often unknowingly, to metaphor and therefore to some form of unconscious "thought." "After Apple Picking" is among the most beautiful poems Frost ever composed. . Insofar as this reading rejects death and immortality as one possible form of sleep in "After Apple-Picking," the commentary is consistent with a general opinion that Frost is nonteleological in his thought. In that weary, drowsy poem the speaker longs to escape through art, symbolized by the nightingale, from the pain of the real world and wants to melt into the welcome oblivion of death: My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains It is appropriate to the whole intention of the poem that where the apple-picker sets out wakefully to accomplish what he has all along been doing in a daze, unconsciously - to make metaphors and to generalize on his experience - the result is a tangle of confusions. It is another to be forced to return to their source, particularly if that source is only the "I myself" who "desired." As usual, in this poem Frost hovers between the daylight world of commonsense reality and the dream world of possibility, the voices of sense and of song, the visions of the pragmatist and the prophet, the compulsions of the road and the seductions of the woods. Essence of winter sleep is on the night, The scent of apples: I am drowsing off. After Apple Picking As a Pastoral Poem. And what are wasted apples for humans who select for beauty and perfection become food for a hibernating woodchuck or further the spread of apple seeds. Their has been a constant battle as to whether Robert Frost is indeed a Romantic poet. In Frost's poetry any deviation, not only from the iambic foot but from the iambic pentameter line as well, is an important marker of the speaker's state of mind, his control, and his capacity for irony. The long and short lines, the irregular rhyme scheme, the recurrent participles (indicating work), the slow tempo and incantatory rhythm all suggest that repetitive labor has drained away his energy. He is only falling asleep in this poem, and he does not yet know which sleep his will be. If anything is retained in the allusion to Jacob, it is the sense of an impending struggle. overtired / Of the great harvest I myself desired," such an analogy carries with it its own measure of reassurance. The lines rhyme in a varied manner. ", In "After Apple- Picking" the matter is handled a bit differently. The parallel between his drowsiness and the "essence of winter sleep" is, at best, tenuous, held together by an uncommitted colon in the last line of the statement, "Essence of winter sleep is on the night, / The scent of apples: I am drowsing off." The last word either introduces a new rhyme that will be picked up in the next stanza: . The source of his creativity is the assumption that his harvest has value, that the activity is worthwhile. . It sticks "through" a tree and not against it. The contrast between the two kinds of sleep, furthermore, has been anticipated from the beginning of the poem, thus providing the fullest impact to the concluding line, "Or just some human sleep.". Simply put, he "desired" a "great harvest," and the desire was sufficiently strong to justify extraordinary discipline and control: "There were ten thousand thousand fruit to touch, / Cherish in hand, lift down, and not let fall." "After Apple-Picking," one of Frost's greatest lyrics, blends the myth of the Fall with consequences of modern science. If the speaker is divorced from nature, then what would "just some human sleep" be? The poem "After Apple Picking" is a master piece of English literature.If we see the poem in literal sense,we come to know, that it deals with the harvest of a farmer who desired to have a bumper crops of apple.God granted his wish but now … Thereafter, he can turn to "fresh tasks" with no need to investigate his values. . . They flick open, and the apples vanish. Their fingers, from excessive toil, are too clumsy and tremble too much for that. 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