After Apple-Picking. A poem 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.

I wrote this review while listening to Copeland-- so don't judge. Basically, I add this to my blog simply to record academic progression through my highschool and college career as an English Lit. Major.

Ahem.

I believe this might be about a man who has worked his whole life, putting as much care into his work as he could (30-36), and is now on the verge of his death (8). He has had too much of this work (28-29), though it still hasn’t had enough of him (1-7). He is so sick of it and has put so much of himself into it, that he is afraid that when he closes his eyes to die, he will be haunted with images of his work even in his death (37-38). Perhaps this poem pertains more to Robert Frost, himself, as a poet. Picking every word with as much care as the apple picker picks his apples, well, one could see how the task would trouble his sleep, or even his death. And perhaps as a poet, he imagined that at his death, though he were done with the work of writing poetry, he knew that there were always a few more poems to write, just as there was a “barrel that [the apple picker] didn’t fill.... or two or three apples [he] didn’t pick upon some bough” (3-5).