After Apple Picking Summary

Introduction

A poem of 42 lines, titled After Apple Picking, was written and published in North Boston in 1941. It is one of Frost's great nature poems. It also has much symbolism.

Theme

As Robert Doyle stated, the poem's content is 'common.' However, the poet has created a familiar' tone that will govern the reader's response to the content. So what is the content?

The main topic of After Apple Picking is life and death. Here, it is evident that the woodchuck and darkness represent death. The job of the apple picker serves as an image of life's uncertainty. The poem's all-pervasive effect of nature on people is another critical subject matter. Like a loving mom, nature influences human behavior.

Summary

The poem's first line describes the apple-picker who carried his two-pointed ladder upward through a tree. He is now totally exhausted from picking apples, even though there is a barrel they didn't fill and another two or three that he didn't take off a branch. Since winter has arrived and the smell of apples has faded, he feels tired. Now, he finds everything in nature. He fell into a trance while collecting apples and started dreaming. Although he is unclear about his dream, he is sure of one thing: big apples have appeared and then disappeared. He feels as if the wind caused his ladder to shake around. He first discusses the joy of sight before moving on to the delight of the sense of hearing. He claims that he can constantly hear loads of apples being brought in from the basement bin. He's so exhausted from gathering apples that he's also feeling it.

When his wish for a big apple plant comes true, he claims he is exhausted from working too much. Ten thousand apples are in front of him, and he finds it impossible to let any of them fall to the ground lest they become damaged and useless. The apple picker predicts what will cause him difficulties when sleeping, regardless of the kind of sleep. If he had remained in the apple orchard, the woodchuck would have informed him if his sleep was similar to that of a bird or was just human.

Analysis

Cleanth Brooks pointed out that After Apple Picking is a fantastic "realistic account." The poem is an outstanding work of descriptive writing; the farmer says it is simply "overtired" and turns away from the idea of sleeping with an element of unusual humor.

However, even a perfect realistic description that stimulates our ideas and imagination tends to have symbolic implications. Such a description conveys other sensations but hazily and goes beyond just describing a physical thing. This all that applies to After Apple Picking. Additionally, a second look at the poem exposes components that are difficult to understand from a just realistic reading. In line 7, the first of these parts makes a statement. Everything up to that point may be interpreted as a literal description.

Line 7 forces us to take nonrealistic readings under consideration. The poem weirdly incorporates the exceptionally provocative term "essence." It does not fit the description of the terminology used in the poem's first section, which is one of the daily, ordinary worlds. In the poem, this uncommon term acts as a signal or signpost. The word "essence" most naturally brings up thoughts of smell or distillates, but it also has a philosophical meaning of something forever and permanent, of an essential component of substance. The term "scent" (as opposed to alternatives like "odor" or "smell") supports the first concept of "essence." Still, it has further philosophical significance, and the assonance adds another subtler implied point. The smell of apples is a priceless perfume, but it should also be somehow connected to "winter sleep."

The sentence "I am drowsing off" is introduced with a colon following the phrase "scent of apples." The harvester is essentially put to sleep by the aroma of apples. The following phrase means that this is not a typical, literal sleep. The sleep had started that morning with a uniqueness that had been noticed when peering through the window ice. So, in some inexplicable way, the weirdness of the ice vista and the apple aroma work together to generate the "winter sleep."

The dream follows that. It is true that when we are overtired, we often repeat the action that made us feel that way in our dreams, much as when one is driving all day and still needs to deal with oncoming traffic. Therefore, the nature of this dream has a realistic psychological foundation. Still, we must also remember that it was provisioned that morning, and dreams that are literal in a literal reality don't start that way. The poem's elements, however, are not as explicit as those in Frost's poem Desert Palaces; instead, "they are constantly implying a kind of fantasy." (C. Brooks)

To start over with the poem, a series of differences gradually emerge between the worlds of summer and winter, labor and rest, reward and effort, wakefulness and sleep, the world of normal vision and the world as distorted by the ice, and the world of reality and the world of dreams. And each pairing represents a different element of a single contrast. But the contrast of what? If you will, consider it a comparison of two points of view on experiences or life in general.

In other words, we take a broad, bare, generalized perspective on apple-picking and picking, which mark the completion of some human labor in the actual world and are followed by reward, relaxation, and dreaming. To take it a step further, we may argue that there is a contradiction between what is real and what is ideal. The reality can be found in specifics like "My long two-pointed ladder's sticking through a tree/Toward heaven still." However, the ideal goes beyond the factual assertion and interprets "Towards heaven still" philosophically. Then, "heaven" becomes the location of man's rewards, residence, the repository of his ideals, and desires.

It may be argued at this point that it is strange to link the dream in the poem with the ideal since the dream appears to be a nightmare of the day's work. Is the dream a nightmare yet? The poet claims to be "overtired" after picking apples for so long. He knows that the instep arch will prevent the pain and that his sleep will be disturbed. However, we have to compare these explicit remarks with the overall quality of the work.