Critical Analysis of 'After Apple Picking" by Robert Frost - Disha Chaudhry

After apple picking
- Robert Frost (1915)

Robert Frost was a very popular Poet. Although he was considered a quintessential New England poet, he had spent the first 11 years of his life in San Francisco. Upon his father’s death, he and his family moved to Lawrence, Massachusetts where Frost continued his schooling and later on started college. A modern writer, Frost has been critiqued for being his subtle wit, broad humor and strength of content, ensured his place in the eyes of almost no influence of any specific school. Eventually, Frost mastered his art of poetry writing and hence, worked outside of movements and manifestos to create his own niche in English literature.

This poem is based on the narrator being tired as he spent the day apple picking and he is now tired of continuing this job. He has felt sleepy since morning. Even when he picks up a piece of ice from the drinking trough and he looks at his apples through it, he cannot escape the thought of his apples even in his sleep, as he narrates how he can imagine the apples growing from the blossoms, failing off trees, and piling up in the cellar. He ends the poem by questioning himself, if the sleep he is getting is a normal ‘human’s’ sleep or a deep winter’s sleep like the Woodchuck when it hibernates.

After Apple Picking, is a great representation of Frost’s writing. He breaks in and out of traditional structure. Almost half the poem, (25 lines), are written in standard iambic pentameter, and the rest (17 lines) end with rhymed words. This drifting structure symbolizes the switch between the consciously awakened state and a dream-like state, which the narrator is constantly dwelling about.

This poem could simply be talking about an apple picker who is tried after a hard day of work but cannot seem to escape the mental act of apple picking. He mentions how he can still feel the ache in his foot as if he is standing on a ladder and vision all his apples. He also mentions the apples that are fallen to the ground and are injured could still be consigned to the cider press.

The narrator’s everyday act of picking apples also speaks to a more metaphorical discussion of seasonal changes and death. Although we do not know where the poem is set, we do know winter is coming near. Winter, symbolizing, death and decay: the grass is “hoary,” the surface of the water in the trough is frozen enough to be used as a pane of glass, and the overall sense of the decay that occurs in the “essence” of winter. The narrator does not know whether the death that is coming will either be renewed by spring in a few months or if everything will be trapped under the snow for the rest of the eternity.

Nature figures prominently in Frost’s poetry, and his poems usually include a moment of interaction or encounter between a human speaker and a natural subject, like the apple, in this case. A day of harvesting fruit leads to a new understanding of life’s final sleep, or death. The ice melts, the apples get damaged as they fall to the ground, and he does not feel the need to do what he loves anymore, therefore, the death of his passion to pick apples is also dying as life as an apple=picker is too monotonous for his liking; “For I have had too much Of apple-picking: I am overtired”. But there is no logical connection between being sick of picking apples and simultaneously thinking about apples, as opposed to one who would run away from all ties with something they have had an excess of. The narrator has lost his passion.

The falling of apples helps in biblical imagery. Just like the ‘forbidden fruit’, where the apples are a symbol of earth and the speaker is feeling sympathy for them. The images of these apples “trouble” him in some way.

The title of the poem provided the time in which the poem is set. The title is actually quite helpful because, without it, we might think that the poem is set DURING the apple-picking. As the speaker is about to fall asleep he imagines that he is back in the orchard, but his refection is confused and disoriented. Apple-picking was a common job in autumn in New England, therefore, Frost might be hinting toward how he doesn’t not like the monotonous lives he and his people live.