MODERNIST POETRY

ROBERT FROST’S
“After Apple-Picking”
MODERNIST POETRY
 Robert Frost was born in San Francisco
on March 26, 1874. He moved to New
England at the age of eleven and became
interested in reading and writing poetry
during his high school years in Lawrence,
Massachusetts. He was enrolled at
Dartmouth College in 1892, and later at
Harvard, though he never earned a
formal degree.
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 Frost drifted through a string of
occupations after leaving school, working
as a teacher, cobbler, and editor of the
Lawrence Sentinel. His first professional
poem, "My Butterfly," was published on
November 8, 1894, in the New York
newspaper The Independent.
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 In 1895, Frost married Elinor Miriam White,
who became a major inspiration in his
poetry until her death in 1938. The couple
moved to England in 1912, after their New
Hampshire farm failed, and it was abroad
that Frost met and was influenced by such
contemporary British poets as Edward
Thomas, Rupert Brooke, and Robert Graves.
While in England, Frost also established a
friendship with the poet Ezra Pound, who
helped to promote and publish his work.
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 By the time Frost returned to the United
States in 1915, he had published two full-
length collections, A Boy's Will and North of
Boston, and his reputation was established.
By the nineteen-twenties, he was the most
celebrated poet in America, and with each
new book—including New Hampshire (1923),
A Further Range (1936), Steeple Bush (1947),
and In the Clearing (1962)—his fame and
honors (including four Pulitzer Prizes)
increased.
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 Though his work is principally associated with the
life and landscape of New England, and though he
was a poet of traditional verse forms and metrics
who remained steadfastly aloof from the poetic
movements and fashions of his time, Frost is
anything but a merely regional or minor poet.
 The author of searching and often dark
meditations on universal themes, he is a
quintessentially modern poet in his adherence to
language as it is actually spoken, in the
psychological complexity of his portraits, and in
the degree to which his work is infused with
layers of ambiguity and irony.
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 In a 1970 review of The Poetry of Robert Frost,
the poet Daniel Hoffman describes Frost's
early work as "the Puritan ethic turned
astonishingly lyrical and enabled to say out
loud the sources of its own delight in the
world," and comments on Frost's career as
The American Bard: "He became a national
celebrity, our nearly official Poet Laureate,
and a great performer in the tradition of
that earlier master of the literary vernacular,
Mark Twain."
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 About Frost, President John F. Kennedy
said, "He has bequeathed his nation a
body of imperishable verse from which
Americans will forever gain joy and
understanding."
 Robert Frost lived and taught for many
years in Massachusetts and Vermont, and
died in Boston on January 29, 1963.
MODERNIST POETRY
 "After Apple-Picking"
 After a long day’s work, the speaker is tired
of apple picking.
 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.
MODERNIST POETRY
 This is a rhyming poem that follows no
preordained rhyme scheme. “After Apple-
Picking” is basically iambic, and mostly in
pentameter, but line-length variants abound. Line
1, for example, is long by any standard. Line 32 is
very short: one foot.
 The poem’s shorter lines of di-, tri-, and
tetrameter serve to syncopate and sharpen the
steady, potentially droning rhythm of pentameter.
 They keep the reader on her toes, awake, while
the speaker drifts off into oblivion.
MODERNIST POETRY
 At the end of a long day of apple picking, the
narrator is tired and thinks about his day. He has
felt sleepy and even trance-like since the early
morning, when he looked at the apple trees
through a thin sheet of ice that he lifted from the
drinking trough.
 He feels himself beginning to dream but cannot
escape the thought of his apples even in sleep: he
sees visions of apples growing from blossoms,
falling off trees, and piling up in the cellar.
 As he gives himself over to sleep, he wonders if it
is the normal sleep of a tired man or the deep
winter sleep of death.
MODERNIST POETRY
 This poem is bizarre because it weaves in
and out of 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.
 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.
MODERNIST POETRY
 In some respects, this poem 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.
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 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.
MODERNIST POETRY
 Because of the varying rhymes and tenses of the
poem, 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
— shifting 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.
MODERNIST POETRY
 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 he is “done
with apple-picking now” has more finality,
almost as if his vision of the apple harvest
is a farewell.
MODERNIST POETRY
 Even so, he can be satisfied in his work
because, with the exception of a few apples
on the tree, he fulfilled all of his obligations
to the season and to 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 actually happens.
MODERNIST POETRY
 First, a comment on form. Throughout the poem,
both rhyme and line-length are manipulated and
varied with subtlety.
 The mystery of the rhymes—when will they
come and how abruptly—keeps words and
sounds active and hovering over several lines.
We find the greatest separation between rhyming
end-words at the poem’s conclusion.
 Sleep comes seven lines after its partner, heap,
and in the interim, sleep has popped up three
times in the middle of lines. Sleep is, in fact, all
over the poem; the word appears six times.
MODERNIST POETRY
 “There are many other things I have found myself
saying about poetry, but the chiefest of these is
that it is metaphor, saying one thing and meaning
another, saying one thing in terms of another, the
pleasure of ulteriority.”
 This is Robert Frost in 1946, in an essay for The
Atlantic Monthly.
 “After Apple-Picking” is about picking apples, but
with its ladders pointing “[t]oward heaven still,”
with its great weariness, and with its rumination
on the harvest, the coming of winter, and
inhuman sleep, the reader feels certain that the
poem harbors some “ulteriority.”
MODERNIST POETRY
 “Final sleep” is certainly one interpretation of the
“long sleep” that the poet contrasts with human
sleep.
 The sleep of the woodchuck is the sleep of winter,
and winter, in the metaphoric language of seasons,
has strong associations with death. Hints of winter
are abundant: The scent of apples is “the essence of
winter sleep”; the water in the trough froze into a
“pane of glass”; the grass is “hoary” (i.e., frosty, or
Frosty).
 Yet is the impending death destructive or creative?
The harvest of apples can be read as a harvest of any
human effort—study, laying bricks, writing poetry,
etc.—and this poem looks at the end of the harvest.
MODERNIST POETRY
 The sequence and tenses of the poem are a
bit confusing and lead one to wonder what
is dreamed, what is real, and where the
sleep begins. It’s understandable that the
speaker should be tired at the end of a day’s
apple picking.
 But the poem says that the speaker was well
on his way to sleep before he dropped the
sheet of ice, and this presumably occurred in
the morning.
MODERNIST POETRY
 The speaker has tried and failed to “rub the
strangeness” from his sight. Is this a strangeness
induced by exhaustion or indicative of the fact that
he is dreaming already?
 Has he, in fact, been dreaming since he looked
through the “pane of glass” and entered a through-
the-looking-glass world of “magnified apples” and the
“rumbling sound / Of load on load of apples coming
in”?
 Or is the sheet of ice simply a dizzying lens whose
effect endures?
 If, in fact, the speaker was well on his way to sleep in
the morning, does this lend a greater, more ominous
weight to the long sleep “coming on” at the poem’s
end?
MODERNIST POETRY
 The overall tone of the poem might not support
such a reading, however; nothing else about it is
particularly ominous—and Frost can do ominous
when he wants to.
 How we ultimately interpret the tone of the
poem has much to do with how we interpret the
harvest. Has it been a failure?
 Certainly there is a sense of incompleteness—”a
barrel that I didn’t fill.”
 The speaker’s inner resources give out before
the outer resources are entirely collected.
MODERNIST POETRY
 On the other hand, the poet speaks only of
“two or three apples” remaining, and these
only “may” be left over. Do we detect
satisfaction, then? The speaker has done all
that was within his power; what’s left is the
result of minor, inevitable human
imperfection. Is this, then, a poem about the
rare skill of knowing when to quit
honorably? This interpretation seems
reasonable.
MODERNIST POETRY
 Yet if the speaker maintains his honor,
why will his sleep be troubled? There
were “ten thousand thousand”—that is to
say, countless—fruit to touch, and none
could be fumbled or it was lost. Did the
speaker fumble many? Did he leave more
than he claims he did? Or are the
troubled dreams a nightmare
magnification and not a reflection of the
real harvest?
MODERNIST POETRY
 Lines 28-29 are important: “I am overtired /
Of the great harvest I myself desired.”
 If there has been failure or too great a
strain on the speaker, it is because the
speaker has desired too great a harvest.
 He saw an impossible quantity of fruit as a
possibility. Or he saw a merely incredible
quantity of fruit as possibility and nearly
achieved it (at the cost of physical and
mental exhaustion).
MODERNIST POETRY
 When we read “After Apple-Picking”
metaphorically, we may want to look at it as
a poem about the effort of writing poetry.
 The cider-apple heap then makes a nice
metaphor for saved and recycled bits of
poetry, and the long sleep sounds like
creative (permanent?) hibernation.
 This is one possible metaphoric substitution
among many; it seems plausible enough
(though nowise definitive or exclusive).
MODERNIST POETRY
 Our search for “ulteriority” may benefit from
respecting, not replacing, the figure of the apples.
 Apple picking, in Western civilization, has its own
built-in metaphorical and allegorical universe, and we
should especially remember this when we read a
poet whose work frequently revisits Eden and the
Fall (c.f. “Nothing Gold Can Stay,” “Never Again
Would Birds’ Song Be the Same,” “It is Almost the
Year Two Thousand,” “The Oven Bird”).
 When the poet speaks of “the great harvest I myself
desired,” consider also what apples represent in
Genesis: knowledge and some great, punishable claim
to godliness—creation and understanding, perhaps.
MODERNIST POETRY
 This sends us scurrying back to lines 1and 2,
where the apple-picking ladder sticks through the
tree “Toward heaven still.”
 What has this harvest been, then, with its infinite
fruits too many for one person to touch? What
happens when such apples strike the earth—are
they really of no worth?
 And looked at in this new light, what does it
mean to be “done with apple-picking now”?
 All of these questions are enough to make one
forswear metaphor and limit oneself to a strict
diet of literalness. But that isn’t nearly as much
fun.
MODERNIST POETRY
 Lines 1-2:
 The first couple lines seem to suggest that the
speaker is still picking apples, which is strange when
you consider that the title says "after."
 At any rate, he has one of those old-fashioned
ladders with the two points at the end that you have
to lean against the tree. The top of the ladder points
toward heaven, which is a strange detail for him to
mention.
 It immediately gives the poem religious overtones.
You might think of "Jacob's Ladder," a Biblical story in
which Jacob dreams of a ladder up to heaven that
angels climb. God stands at the top of the ladder and
tells Jacob that he and his descendents will be
blessed.
MODERNIST POETRY
 Lines 3-6:
 There is a barrel next to him that hasn't been filled yet.
Clearly the speaker has been filling barrels with apples all
day, and now he feels this obligation to fill that last barrel.
The barrel stands next to the ladder, which is propped
against a tree. He paints a little picture of what apple-picking
looks like.
 In addition to the empty barrel, there are ripe apples still
hanging from the tree. What are you doing, man? Chop,
chop! Pick those apples! Fill that last barrel!
 Nope, he thinks, not gonna pick 'em. Even though he knows
he could go that extra mile and get every last apple, he has
decided to stop picking for the day.
 The speaker says, "I am done" with it, which means both "I'm
going to stop" and "I'm getting sick of this."
MODERNIST POETRY
 Lines 7-8:
 These lines are very important, as they might
cause us to reevaluate where the poem is set. It
is nighttime, and the speaker is very tired.
 He compares his approaching sleep to an
"essence" or smell that wafts through the winter
night. Not surprisingly, this essence smells like
apples.
 At this point, we have two options. Either he
falling asleep on his ladder in the orchard as night
falls, or he is in bed, just thinking about being out
in the orchard. Keep these two options in mind
throughout the poem.
MODERNIST POETRY
 Lines 9-13:
 These are the most confusing lines of the poem, because
they refer to a phenomenon that few people have to deal
with nowadays.
 Basically, the speaker remembers how, earlier that morning,
he went outside to get drinking water from his trough.
That's right: his water does not come from a tap.
 The night was cold enough to freeze the top layer of the
trough into a sheet of ice, and the speaker picked up
("skimmed") this sheet to get at the sweet, sweet water
beneath. Then he held up the ice sheet and looked out at the
world through it. The speaker saw the frost-covered
("hoary") grass, distorted by the mirror ("glass") of the ice.
It's like looking at a fun-house mirror, except it's not really a
mirror, because he is looking through the ice.
MODERNIST POETRY
 Then the ice started to melt, probably from the
warmth of his hand, and he let it "fall and break"
against the ground. End of story.
 What's the point of all this? According to the
speaker, it made his vision seem "strange," as if he
was looking through a distorted lens, and he
hasn't been able to get rid of this sense of
strangeness all day. He has tried to "rub" it from
his sight, like you might rub the sleep out of your
eyes in the morning, but it hasn't worked. The
whole world continues to look odd.
MODERNIST POETRY
 Lines 14-17:
 The speaker says he was "upon [his] way to sleep"
before the ice dropped, which doesn't make any
sense unless you consider that he is already starting
to dream about the memory.
 In real life, he dropped the ice, but in his thoughts
before sleep, he cut away from the image before the
ice could fall.
 We're now thinking that it is more likely that the
speaker is in bed after a long, hard day than that he is
still up on the ladder. Which is good, because it
would be kind of dangerous to fall asleep on a ladder.
 He guesses what he will dream about when he falls
completely asleep.
MODERNIST POETRY
 Lines 18-20:
 No surprise here: he's going to dream about
apples. The apples have an otherworldly
appearance, as they are "magnified" in his
mind. They float by him like little orbs or
stars across his vision.
 They "appear and disappear," similar to how
the real apples would disappear into the
barrel after he picked them. The speaker
can see the brownish-reddish specks that
dot the surface of the apples. This color is
called "russet."
MODERNIST POETRY
 Lines 21-23:
 The speaker describes how realistic his dreams about
the apple-picking are going to be. He can even feel
the pressure of the ladder on the bottom of his foot,
and the "swaying" of the ladder against the bending
branches of the apple tree.
 Frost zooms in on a tiny but telling detail: the
speaker feels not only the ache from the ladder on
his foot, which would be natural to feel later in the
day. He also feels the continuing pressure of the
ladder, as if he were still standing on it.
 Since it's now clear that he is dreaming, we'll
encourage you to look at again at the Biblical story of
Jacob's ladder.
 A "ladder-round" is one of the round steps on an old-
fashioned wooden ladder.
MODERNIST POETRY
 Lines 24-26:
 The dream is so realistic that you feel like
you're right there with him in the orchard.
He hears the sound of barrels of apples
being unloaded into a bin for sorting, and we
practically can too.
 The speaker is not the only apple picker:
others are working in the orchard too. They
constantly empty and refill their barrels
throughout the day.
MODERNIST POETRY
 Lines 27-29:
 He states, in the most direct terms yet, that he is sick of
picking apples. Talk about a guy who brings his work home
with him!
 The poem slips into rhyme for just a couplet, with the
pairing of "overtired" and "desired." This could be the moral
of the poem, except it occurs in the middle. Also, it's not
very profound: we had already guessed that this was his
attitude.
 The speaker used to be really excited for the harvest, but
now he's had too much of a good thing.
 The first word of line 27 is "for," as if Frost were explaining
why he has just imagined the harvest so vividly. But there's
no logical connection between being sick of picking apples
and thinking about apples. You'd imagine that he wouldn't
keep thinking about them…
MODERNIST POETRY
 Lines 30-36:
 The speaker elaborates on why he has grown tired of the
harvest.
 As with any activity that involves picking from plants, the
process grows really old really fast. It's very monotonous –
pick and drop, pick and drop.
 And there are so many apples in the orchard – "ten
thousand thousand," to be exact. That's an exaggeration, to
the tune of ten million apples! But we get the point.
 An important image returns: falling. The speaker had to
worry about not letting the apples drop. Even if the apples
were in perfect condition otherwise, without "bruises" or
"stubble," they would be considered worthless if they
touched the ground. They would have to be thrown in the
heap of apples that will just be used to make cider.
MODERNIST POETRY
 The image of falling first came up in relation to
dropping the ice on the ground. These lines help
explain the speaker's earlier concern with
dropping stuff.
 Ew, cider. Wait, cider is awesome! What's wrong
with cider? Evidently, the apples that make cider
are the worst of the harvest.
 All this hubbub about falling and fruit should
make you think of the Biblical story of the Fall of
Adam and Eve, and their forbidden fruit.
 This poem is full of Biblical imagery. The apples
are a symbol of things that can be corrupted
through contact with earth. The speaker almost
feels bad for them.
MODERNIST POETRY
 Lines 37-38:
 The speaker is still predicting what kind of
dreams he will have. He says that it should now
be clear which images will haunt or "trouble" his
sleep. In other words, images of apples, of falling,
of ladders, and more.
 The word "trouble" is unexpected, because it
implies that these images are disturbing to him in
some way. The poem invites you to consider why
they might be disturbing, but it does not answer
this question.
 Finally, he expresses uncertainty about what kind
of sleep he will have.
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 Lines 39-42:
 He wonders whether he will sleep like a normal
person, or like a hibernating creature, such as a
woodchuck.
 He must be really tired from the harvest. You've
probably had one of those days when you feel
like you could sleep for three days straight. The
speaker thinks he could sleep for three months
straight.
 A woodchuck is a groundhog, and we all know
from a certain famous Bill Murray movie that
groundhogs hibernate in the winter and then
wake up on February 2nd – unless they are being
cranky.
MODERNIST POETRY
 The woodchuck is an expert in hibernation,
so it could say whether the speaker is about
to go into hibernation. Unfortunately, the
woodchuck has already gone to sleep for
the winter, so the speaker will get no
answer to his question.
 He sounds like he would be disappointed
with a "human sleep," even though we all
know that's what he's going to get.
 We can only assume that at this point the
speaker does, in fact, go to sleep. Good
night, buddy.
MODERNIST POETRY
 Biblical Imagery:
 The Bible is never explicitly mentioned in this
poem, but Frost nonetheless includes several
references to well-known stories from the Book
of Genesis.
 These are not specific allusions so much as
commonplace ideas that help structure the poem.
The story of Jacob's Ladder and the Fall of Adam
and Eve both seem to be on the speaker's mind.
 But be careful about interpreting what these
references might "mean." There is surely no one
right answer about their role in the poem.
MODERNIST POETRY
 Lines 1-2: The image of a ladder pointing
toward heaven alludes to the story of
Jacob's Ladder in the Book of Genesis.
 When Jacob was escaping from his jealous
brother Esau, he dreamed of a ladder going
up to heaven that had angels climbing it.
 God was at the top of the ladder, and He
told Jacob that Jacob and his descendants
would be blessed.
MODERNIST POETRY
 Line 13: The speaker is thinking about items
falling because he has been trying not to
drop apples all day. But the combination of
falling and fruit seems to allude to the
Biblical Fall, in which Adam and Eve tasted
the forbidden fruit and were therefore
expelled from the Garden of Eden.
 Lines 21-22: At this point, we know that he
is beginning to dream, which makes the
connection to the story of Jacob's Ladder
even more clear.
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 Lines 31-36: The apples that fell and hit
the earth are symbols of sin and earthly
corruption. They are treated "as of no
worth," similar to how Adam and Eve
were treated after they metaphorically
"fell to earth" by tasting the forbidden
fruit.
 It is important to note that Frost has
sympathy for these corrupted apples, as if
they represented all of humanity.
MODERNIST POETRY
 Sleep and Dreams:
 Dreams are fuzzy creatures, and the
poem captures the vague and disorderly
progress of the speaker's thoughts from
one subject to another. Images of falling
and dropping things are especially notable.
The most direct explanation for these
images is that the speaker has been
worried about not dropping apples all
day.
MODERNIST POETRY
 Line 9: The speaker's strange view of the
world, even since that morning, is compared
metaphorically to sleep or to some other
physical object that is caught in his eye. But
he cannot "rub" out the strangeness in the
way that you can rub out sleep in the
morning.
 Line 10: The sheet of ice that froze over the
water is described metaphorically as a
"pane of glass," because the speaker can
look through it. Also, a "glass" is an old-
fashioned word for "mirror."
MODERNIST POETRY
 Line 15: The speaker confuses the time of the
memory with the real time of his falling asleep. At
the point in the memory at which the ice falls, he
was already starting to drift to sleep.
 Line 37: The word "trouble" is very ambiguous
here. It has connotations of bad and disturbing
dreams, even though we don't know what's so
scary about some falling apples.
 Lines 40-41: Frost personifies the woodchuck as
if it were a person who could read the poem and
say, "Yup, sounds like you're headed for
hibernation, my friend!" or, "Nope, you're still
just a human being. Sorry!"
MODERNIST POETRY
 The Harvest:
 The poem takes place at the end of the
harvest, with the last fruit hanging on the
tree and winter coming on. The harvest
symbolizes growth and creativity, but
this burst of life has ended and now both
the earth and its many of its creatures are
preparing to enter a period of
hibernation.
MODERNIST POETRY
 Lines 18-20: The dream presents the apples in
fine detail. Even the small flecks of brownish-red
are visible on the surface. He has been watching
apples "appear and disappear" all day.
 Line 30: "Ten thousand thousand" apples would
be ten million! We doubt he actually counted all
the apples picked. Instead, he is exaggerating. The
technical term for this device is hyperbole.
 Line 36: He uses a subtle simile to describe how
the fallen apples are treated. They are not really
worthless, because the apple cider still has some
value. But the speaker's point is that, compared
to the non-corrupted apples, they might as well
be worthless.
MODERNIST POETRY
 Rhyme, Form & Meter:
 Rhyming iambic pentameter lines are the most
common form and meter in Frost's early poetry,
or at least in the poems from his first two
collections, A Boy's Will and North of Boston.
Iambic pentameter lines have five "iambs" –
rhythmic units of a short, unaccented syllable
followed by a longer, accented syllable.
 Iambic pentameter sounds like da-DUM da-DUM
da-DUM da-DUM da-DUM:
 My in|-step arch | not on|-ly keeps | the ache,
It keeps | the pres|-sure of | a lad|-der round
MODERNIST POETRY
 But the rhymes in "After Apple-Picking" do not
follow a set pattern. Sometimes a rhyme occurs
at every other line, sometimes at every fourth
line, and sometimes in consecutive lines.
 Lines 28 and 29, for example, take the reader by
surprise with an abrupt rhyming couplet
("overtired"/"desired") that stands out against the
more widely spaced rhymes elsewhere.
 Such irregularly rhyming verse was used
frequently in dramas of the English Renaissance,
and it is fitting that the form would be used
extensively throughout North of Boston, a
collection that contains several longer, dramatic
poems.
MODERNIST POETRY
 Although it's entirely possibly that the
speaker is a hired laborer or that he's just a
guy who's helping out his buddy down the
road, our best guess is that the speaker is a
man who lives on a farm with an orchard. If
he lived in the city or even in a town, he
probably wouldn't collect his drinking water
from a trough every morning. In the early
twentieth century, lots of people in New
England lived on some kind of farm, even if it
was not their primary source of income.
MODERNIST POETRY
 We doubt that he makes enough (if any)
money off of the apples to pay the bills.
It's just something he does on the side.
He's a very hard worker, but not a
perfectionist. He's willing to leave a few
good apples still on the branch when
quitting time comes, though deep down
he feels a little guilty about it.
MODERNIST POETRY
 The speaker's imagination is very active and
drives him to look at the world from unusual
perspectives, such as staring through a sheet of
ice.
 Strange images tend to stay with him for a long
time. A self-reflective fellow, you might say. He
has soaked up some New England Protestantism
and has read the Bible, but the emphasis on sin
and corruption in the Old Testament seems to
"trouble" him.
 Perhaps most of all, he's one bone-tired fellow.
He may not sleep through the whole winter, but
if you let him, he'd probably sleep for at least two
days.
MODERNIST POETRY
 This is a poem that many people, even scholars,
would have to re-read a couple of times.
 That doesn't mean it's especially difficult – that's just
how some poetry works. Frost tries to recreate the
sense of tired, dream-like reflection just before sleep,
and people don't often think in a linear fashion during
that time.
 Also, there are some details – particularly the detail
about ice frozen at the top of a water trough – that
date the poem to an earlier historical period.
 But as long as you're willing to tolerate some
ambiguity in the themes and language, this poem
shouldn't be anywhere near as hard as having to pick
"ten thousand thousand" apples while perched on a
ladder!
MODERNIST POETRY
 Frost is often wrongly assumed to be a
simple nature poet who celebrates the joys
of the outside world through rose-colored
glasses.
 But generally the people who think this
have not read enough of his poems, because
even in his most nostalgic nature poems, like
this one, there is an underlying darkness.
 In "After Apple-Picking," he worries about
the way fallen apples are perceived as
worthless and says his dreams will be
"troubled."
MODERNIST POETRY
 The title of the poem provides the time in which
it is set.
 The title is actually quite helpful because, without
it, you might think that the poem is set during the
apple-picking.
 As the speaker is about the fall asleep, he
imagines that he is back in the orchard, but his
reflection is confused and disoriented.
 Apart from this practical help, the title is very
modest.
 It refers to a commonplace autumn job, at least
for people who own farms in New England,
without hinting at all the symbolic resonances
that the poem itself will present.
MODERNIST POETRY
 The poem's sound is like an early twentieth
century version of freestyle rap.
 "After Apple-Picking" has an improvisational
feel, and Frost doesn't worry about
maintaining a regular rhythm or rhyme
scheme.
 He knows that the audience isn't going to
quibble with the lack of a symmetrical form
if the total package sounds great.
MODERNIST POETRY
 The rhyme scheme is the best example of how
Frost is motivated by sound and not by form.
He's like a rapper or a slam poet in the way that
he sticks with a rhyme until he runs out of good
uses for it.
 In lines 14-16, he rhymes "well," "fell," and "tell"
within a short space. Or he'll wait several lines
before rhyming with an earlier word.
 Several of the rhymes are spaced four lines apart,
like "earth" and "worth" (lines 33 and 36).
 And if he sees the chance to use a rhyme right
away, he'll just cut a line short, as with lines 31
and 32, where "fall" is followed immediately by
"For all."