Key Info
Title: After Apple Picking
Poet: Robert Frost (1874-1963)
Written: 1914 in his second collection North of Boston
Setting: Rural New England
Themes
Worry, Work, and Sleep; The Cycle of Life and Death
Symbol: Apples appear throughout the poem as symbols of creative ideas or the products (that is, the “fruits”) of one’s labor.
Sleep, Ladder.
Summary
“After Apple Picking” is a wonderful poem by Robert Frost in which he tries to depict rural England. This poem is mainly written about the speaker’s subsequent experience of picking apples.
One day the speaker goes to the apple orchard with a ladder and a barrel. He put up a ladder and plucked many apples from the tree. Then he started filling the barrel. According to him, he has collected about ten thousand apples. There are still many apples to be picked. But he is feeling very tired. His eyes are closing with sleep, and he passes out in a daze. He sits under a tree to rest. Then it seems to him that the apples lying in front of his eyes, and the whole environment is mysterious. He then remembered that he was drinking one day and picked up an ice cube from the glass and tried to look through it. As vague as that seemed, so were his immediate surroundings right now. He could not free himself from the thought of Apple.
He becomes drowsy and dreams. He sees big apples moving around him. He also sees apples growing from flowers, falling from trees, and accumulating in barrels. In his sleep, he wonders whether it is a normal sleep of a tired man or hibernating like a woodchuck. Here hibernation is compared to death.
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