'After Apple Picking' by Robert Frost

Even before we think of either a summary or critical appreciation and analysis of 'After Apple Picking' by Robert Frost, we must remember that Robert Frost is a landscape poet.

His poetry is always enriched with the depiction of agrarian and natural scenes. 

While 'After Apple Picking' in more than one way. corresponds to Frost's regular thematic motif of bringing in the pastoral flavor of the landscape; his poem also bears a deceptive surface simplicity as the reader is invited to plunge himself into a world of uncertainty resulting out of the openness of the text and its unstated, and yet half-defined associations with some things other than the poem primarily surface.

The theme of 'After Apple Picking' by Robert Frost

In 'After Apple Picking', he appears to have presented a simple theme, that how peacefully an overtired villager is lulled to sleep by the "essence of winter sleep", Nature. 

An apple picker has a plentiful crop. 

He is picking apples while standing on a two-pointed ladder. The winter evening falls soon. 

The apple picker is fed up with apple picking now. The cold winter breeze is filled with the scent of apples. 

It is a perfect setting to induce sleep and he is "drowsing off" under the powerful effect of Nature. 

He wants to pick apples and tries to "rub the strangeness away".

Soon, he is on his way to sleep. In this process

"magnified apples appear and disappear"

He does not confirm whether it would be human sleep or like woodchuck a long sleep. 

Though Robert Frost insists that the poem is written purely in the context of a rural aspect and it shows nothing more than the beauty of nature prevailing upon the human mind, intellect, and will, yet the poem does allude to certain extended meanings. 

Analysis of "After Apple Picking" by Robert Frost

Since the poet has left the ending of the poem open; therefore, the sleep of the peasant could either be related to death or intoxication since the apple picker is "drowsing" under the appeasing influence of mighty nature.

In terms of form,  'After Apple Picking' by Robert Frost is bizarre because it weaves in and out of the traditional structure. 

Approximately twenty-five of the forty-two lines are written in standard iambic pentameter, and there are twenty end-rhymes throughout the poem. 

This wandering structure allows Frost to emphasize the sense of moving between a waking and dream-like state, just as the narrator does. 

 'After Apple Picking' by Robert Frost | by Aleksandr Volkov

   

The repetition of the term "sleep," even after its paired rhyme ("heap") has long been forgotten, also highlights the narrator's gradual descent into dreaming.

In some respects, this poem  'After Apple Picking' by Robert Frost is simply about apple picking. 

After a hard day of work, the apple farmer completely fatigued but is still unable to escape the mental act of picking apples. 

He still sees the apples in front of him, still feels the ache in his foot as if he is standing on a ladder, still bemoans the fate of the flawless apples that fall to the ground and must be consigned to the cider press.

Yet, as in all of Frost's poems, the narrator's everyday act of picking apples also speaks to a more metaphorical discussion of seasonal changes and death. 

Although the narrator does not say when the poem takes place, it is clear that winter is nearly upon him: the grass is "hoary,". 

The surface of the water in the trough is frozen enough to be used as a pane of glass, and there is an overall sense of the "essence" of winter. 

Death is coming, but the narrator does not know if the death will be renewed by spring in a few months or if everything will stay buried under mindless snow for all eternity.

Because of the varying rhymes and tenses of the poem 'After Apple Picking' by Robert Frost, it is not clear when the narrator is dreaming or awake. 

One possibility is that the entirety of the poem takes place within a dream. 

The narrator is already asleep and is automatically reliving the day's harvest as he dreams. 

This explanation clarifies the disjointed narrative — shilling from topic to topic as the narrator dreams — as well as the narrator's assertion that he was 

"well upon my way to sleep" 

-before the sheet of ice, fell from his hands.

Another explanation is that the narrator is dying, and his rambling musings on apple picking are the fevered hallucinations of a man about to leave the world of the living. 

With that in mind. the narrator's declaration that lie is 

"done with apple-picking now" 

-has more finality. 

Almost as it is his vision of the apple harvest as a farewell. 

Even so, he can be satisfied with his work because. except for a few apples on the tree, he fulfilled all of his obligations to the season and himself.

Significantly, even as he falls into a complete sleep, the narrator is unable to discern if he is dying or merely sleeping. 

The two are merged completely in the essence of the oncoming winter, and Frost refuses to tell the reader what happens.

'After Apple-Picking'  by Robert Frost may appear to have also blended the myth of the Fall with consequences of modern science. 

The "two-pointed ladder" figures as both the instrument and the technology of tropism toward "heaven" that ultimately leads to the oneiric hell of uncertainty and of waste and struggle. 

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:

"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 maybe two or three

Apples I didn't pick upon some bough.

But I am done with apple-picking now."

In 'After Apple Picking' by Robert Frost the "magnified apples" may also be referred to as human desires which may never be satiated to their fill. 

Sometimes, one may even have achieved lifelong goals and targets have been met but life does not stay longer to support one to relish the fruits of one's labors. 

Hence, magnified apples may refer to unfulfilled desires. 

However, if we wish to move a step further, it could also imply the lust of man which can never be satisfied. 

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. 

'After Apple Picking' by Robert Frost has often been compared to Keats' "Ode to Autumn", as if it were primarily a celebration of the harvest. 

But its elevated diction (quite distinct from anything else in the book) as well as its images, mood, and theme, all suggest a greater affinity with Keats' "Ode to a Nightingale." 

In that weary, drowsy poem the speaker longs to escape through art, symbolized 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

My sense, as though of hemlock 1 had drunk,

Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains

One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk,"

'After Apple Picking' by Robert Frost's narrator, standing on the earth but looking upward, is also suspended between the real and the dream world. 

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 from his energy. 

The perfume of the apples - equated through "essence" with profound rest -has the narcotic, almost sensual effect of ether. 

Is after apple picking about death?

From some perspectives "After Apple Picking" tells us about death.

'After Apple Picking' by Robert Frost's speaker, like Keats', is suffused with drowsy numbness, yet enters the visionary state necessary to artistic creation;

"Essence of winter sleep is on the night.

The scent or apples: I am drowsing off.

I cannot rub the strangeness from my sight

I got from looking through a pane or glass

I skimmed this morning from the drinking trough."

The openness and inconclusive character of 'After Apple Picking' by Robert Frost generating out of the deceptive simplicity of the piece allows the reader to find the truth.