Life and Nature - Scf - State College of Florida

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“After Apple Picking”
My long two-pointed ladder's sticking through a tree
Toward heaven still,
And there's a barrel that I didn't fill
Beside it, and there may be two or three
Apples I didn't pick upon some bough.
But I am done with apple-picking now.
Essence of winter sleep is on the night,
The scent of apples: I am drowsing off.
I cannot rub the strangeness from my sight
I got from looking through a pane of glass
I skimmed this morning from the drinking trough
And held against the world of hoary grass.
It melted, and I let it fall and break.
But I was well
Upon my way to sleep before it fell,
And I could tell
What form my dreaming was about to take.
Magnified apples appear and disappear,
Stem end and blossom end,
And every fleck of russet showing clear.
My instep arch not only keeps the ache,
It keeps the pressure of a ladder-round.
*The theme of this poem is that life will always lead to
death. However, he tries to explain this in a more subtle
tone by using “sleep” instead of “death” and “apples” in
nature as something that is familiar with everyone.
Everyone has dreams, memories, etc. For Christians,
the apple started it all with Adam and Eve, and for
Frost, it is the end of it all. Because death is a part of
human and mother nature, Frost uses nature to describe
human death.
1-2: The poet starts the poem by including a Biblical
Allusion to Jacob‟s ladder towards Heaven in Genesis
28:10-19. This automatically represents that the
speaker is making his way towards death the further up
the apple tree he gets.
3-6: The speaker shows how human nature can get in
the way of dedication and cause one to give up.
7-8: The speaker seems to be entering a dream-like
state similar to hibernation since winter is just around the
corner.
9: This would be a metaphor to waking up and rubbing
the sleepiness away.
14-20: Even though the poem talks about sleep, it is
about dying and become a part of nature, which is what
the apples represent.