After Apple-Picking

Smells Like:

I agree very much with Seamus Heaney’s assessment that this poem is not about death, that to characterize it as such would be to rob it of its life. It is indeed Frost’s ode to autumn. In another vein, Frost’s “After Apple-Picking” could have been subtitled “The Fall.” A consequence of the Fall is that humans labor. Even the most commonplace human endeavor is steeped in larger significance, which is easy to see in this poem. But we cannot say if the lines following the reference to “dreaming” in line 17 refer to the day’s labor or a memory of it because of the subtle blending of memory and sensation as well as concept and precept.

AFTER APPLE-PICKING
by Robert Frost

My long two-pointed ladder’s sticking through a tree
Toward heaven still,
And there’s a barrel that I didn’t fill
Beside it, and there may be two or three
Apples I didn’t pick upon some bough.
But I am done with apple-picking now.
Essence of winter sleep is on the night,
The scent of apples: I am drowsing off.
I cannot rub the strangeness from my sight
I got from looking through a pane of glass
I skimmed this morning from the drinking trough
And held against the world of hoary grass.
It melted, and I let it fall and break.
But I was well
Upon my way to sleep before it fell,
And I could tell
What form my dreaming was about to take.
Magnified apples appear and disappear,
Stem end and blossom end,
And every fleck of russet showing clear.
My instep arch not only keeps the ache,
It keeps the pressure of a ladder-round.
I feel the ladder sway as the boughs bend.
And I keep hearing from the cellar bin
The rumbling sound
Of load on load of apples coming in.
For I have had too much
Of apple-picking: I am overtired
Of the great harvest I myself desired.
There were ten thousand thousand fruit to touch,
Cherish in hand, lift down, and not let fall.
For all
That struck the earth,
No matter if not bruised or spiked with stubble,
Went surely to the cider-apple heap
As of no worth.
One can see what will trouble
This sleep of mine, whatever sleep it is.
Were he not gone,
The woodchuck could say whether it’s like his
Long sleep, as I describe its coming on,
Or just some human sleep.


By Tom Fasano on October 13, 2008 – 3:06 pm
Posted in Literature, MP3s, Poetry, Robert Frost | No Comments »

Post a Comment

Spam Protection by WP-SpamFree