After Apple-picking

by Robert Frost

After Apple-picking is one of Frost's seemingly simple poems which grows deeper with later readings. After a long day of picking apples, the speaker is tired. He has felt drowsy and dreamy since the morning when he looked through a sheet of ice lifted from the surface of a water trough. Now he feels tired, feels sleep coming on, but wonders whether it is a normal, end-of-the-day sleep or something deeper.
Other poems in this collection include The Pasture, The Wood-pile, and The Self-seeker.

Genres: Poetry, Classics

11 pages, Kindle Edition

First published July 29, 2010

About the author

Flinty, moody, plainspoken and deep, Robert Frost was one of America's most popular 20th-century poets. Frost was farming in Derry, New Hampshire when, at the age of 38, he sold the farm, uprooted his family and moved to England, where he devoted himself to his poetry. His first two books of verse, A Boy's Will (1913) and North of Boston (1914), were immediate successes. In 1915 he returned to the United States and continued to write while living in New Hampshire and then Vermont. His pastoral images of apple trees and stone fences -- along with his solitary, man-of-few-words poetic voice -- helped define the modern image of rural New England. Frost's poems include "Mending Wall" ("Good fences make good neighbors"), "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" ("Whose woods these are I think I know"), and perhaps his most famous work, "The Road Not Taken" ("Two roads diverged in a wood, and I-- / I took the one less traveled by"). Frost was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for poetry four times: in 1924, 1931, 1937 and 1943. He also served as "Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress" from 1958-59; that position was renamed as Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry (or simply Poet Laureate) in 1986.

Frost recited his poem "The Gift Outright" at the 1961 inauguration of John F. Kennedy... Frost attended both Dartmouth College and Harvard, but did not graduate from either school... Frost preferred traditional rhyme and meter in poetry; his famous dismissal of free verse was, "I'd just as soon play tennis with the net down."

Reviews

[Preetam Chatterjee · Rating 5 out of 5]

The apple-picker, having picked apples for a reasonably long time, is now very exhausted. He is drowsed by the aroma of apples and his vision has begun to get blurred. The sleepiness having distorted his vision, he sees things in unusual dimensions. The apples look larger in size. He speculates if it is a customary human slumber, or an animal-like hibernation.

It is tricky to put this poem in any specified category. It is neither a dramatic sequence of events nor a thought-provoking philosophical poem. If at all, one must classify the poem, it may best be called a nature lyric. Nature description is flamboyant, and human experience is fundamentally universal.

Frost's poems are marked by a creepy lucidity, faultless ease and veiled symbolism. This poem is no exception. The surface meaning of the poem is very uncomplicated. An apple­picker has been picking apples all the day long till his head begins to reel. Things assume outlandish shapes, indicating his fatigue. He can no longer work even if he desires to do so. This is the general experience of an over­worked person.

The poem is about all this, but also about other things, whose meaning can be easily read by a discriminating reader.

The poem has been appreciated for its amiable and enchanting quality. It is all so simple and exact, so untailored, yet so novel. It is a poem of reality, but it has the enchantment of a dream. The concrete experience of apple-picking is communicated firmly and realistically. At the same time, the poem invites a metaphorical extension. The task of apple picking, it is suggested, is any task. It is life. The drowsiness which the speaker feels after the completion of the task is associated with the cycle of seasons.

Now let us focus on ‘sleep’ whose nature the speaker himself does not recognize. After speculating about the form his reverie will take and the clamour of apples rumbling, the speaker returns to his own subject of drowsiness. The phrase 'whatever sleep it is' renews the proposition that his sleepiness might be something other than human sleep.
The poem has yet another wisdom to communicate. It suggests that the sleep is like the sleep of death. We are not to feel that the speaker is essentially cognizant of this. But perhaps we are to feel that if this contrast of sleep with death were suggested to him, the speaker would accept it.

There is an excellent and vivid description of the atmosphere in the orchard. This account by the apple-picker gives us the very touch, the very feel of the atmosphere in the orchard. It is a vivacious memory of experience that the reader absorbs physically. Still it is much more than the memory of experience. The apple-picker is re-living the experiences.

This is one of the greatest pieces in all of English poetry, which brings out the, poet's gratification of the sights, sounds and scents of nature. It is, on the other hand, a reverie or monologue of a fatigued apple-picker. Though set in North Boston, the poet thrives in expanding from the particular to the general and eventually universal. It embodies a collective experience, and it does not need any knowledge of the particular place to enjoy the lyric.


Magnified apples appear and disappear,
I feel the ladder sway as the boughs bend.

[K. Anna Kraft · Rating 3 out of 5]

I have arranged my takeaway thoughts on this short poem into a haiku:

"It is exhaustion
That comes in on success's arm
And claims the moment."

[Justine · Rating 3 out of 5]

Despite being a noble and eloquently-written poem—as typical of Robert Frost—After Apple Picking is not one of my favorites of Frost’s. This poem just simply did not resonate with me.


I can appreciate Frost’s sensual choice of apples to get his message across in this poem. My favorite part of the poem is the symbolism of the fallen apples being turned into apple cider, just as missed opportunities in life are useless in the sense that you can not get that opportunity back, yet they can still be used to create something new in the form of learning from your mistakes.

To me, apples represent any and all kinds of life opportunities in this poem. I appreciated Frost’s issue that he brings into play:

• How much labor arduous labor can we go through—even to reach that prestigious goal we so desperately wanted—before we simply cannot continue further without rest?

• Is over exhaustion worth capitalizing on every possible opportunity?

• Are you willing to risk working yourself to death to strive for the best and aim high?

Humans need rest, of some form, to counteract their arduous endeavors, and Frost presents this principle as an irrefutable fact that everyone must self-recognize at some point.


A personal favorite ascent of this poem is the sheet of ice the speaker in the poem views the world through— casting a hazy panorama of a skewed reality, much like exhaustion does to one in real life.


Overall, a very nice poem, albeit one I am not more so emotionally invested in.

I’d like to analyze this poem further if given the chance one day.

[Amelia Bujar · Rating 2 out of 5]

FULL REVIEW ON MY WEBSITE
https://thebookcornerchronicles.com/2...

This poem is tricky because you sort of can’t put it in ant specified category. But it’s fun when poems and books are tricky at least in my opinion.

The writing style for the most part was okay but as someone who have read multiple poems by Robert Frost I know that he can do better than this. But still I had fun reading this poem.

As I said above somewhere this poem didn’t speak to me, but still it is worth the read and it will won’t take you longer than 3 minutes to read it.

This poem needs to get some extra points for the symbolism in it. The symbolism in this poem is about the fallen apples being turned into apple cider.

[HR Habibur Rahman · Rating 4 out of 5]

Was he picking apples on his death bed?

After reading this poem I've got in my mind that whatever you love or do, you will never be out of that thing.

In ISLAM we have a saying that you will be resurrected in the final judgement day with your good works and bad works as well as with those people who were your companion when you were alive.

Reading Frost is always joyful. This poem wasn’t an exception. How he blends real-life incidents in his poem is a miracle into poetry.

[Nancy · Rating 3 out of 5]

The contradiction between the apple harvest evidence in “too much” “ load on load” “thousands thousand” and the picker’s fatigue, lethargy, losses of passion seems bewildering to me at first. After reading Judith’s analysis, it makes sense that “unfulfilment is an inevitable result of desiring too much. The apple is symbolic in the poem, alluding to biblical apple in Adam and Eve’s story.

[J9 · Rating 3 out of 5]

Love Frost and this is a great one for this time of year. Although even our narrator gets tired of picking apples after a time. Bought a bushel of apples this week and made apple pancakes, apple pies, apple syrup, apple butter, and apple sauce. Still not done. But unlike the poem, I'm not quite tired of apples yet. :)

[kimby · Rating 4 out of 5]

"For I have had too much / Of apple-picking: I am overtired / Of the great harvest I myself desired" (lines 27-29)
maybe it's me being depressed abt the economy but why do we always have to strive for more... why must millionaires want more money! why can't we just be happy! i'm tired!

[S · Rating 5 out of 5]

For I have had too much
Of apple-picking: I am overtired
Of the great harvest I myself desired.

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.

robert frost and johnny greenwood's new currency. in my feels <3

[Razvan Banciu · Rating 4 out of 5]

As usual for Frost's poems, there are two keys in which you can "read" the story.
The simple and more obvious one is that an apple-picker is exhausted after a long day work, but still thinking about it.
The second one is a parable about life. Someone is trying to do his best, but he always wonders if that was enough. Or maybe not...

"For I have had too much
Of apple-picking: I am overtired
Of the great harvest I myself desired."

[Tara Frye · Rating 2 out of 5]

It was really boring