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The poem has no predetermined rhythmic pattern, however it is iambic. It varies from iambic monometer, up to iambic hexameter.
Examples:
iambic monometer: "For all"
iambic hexameter: "My long two-pointed ladder's sticking through a tree"
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.
I feel the ladder sway as the boughs bend.
And I keep hearing from the cellar bin
The rumbling sound
Of load on load of apples coming in.
This section of the poem almost feels as if you are in the realm with the poet. He uses vivid imagery to convey his thoughts and visions, as well as all 5 senses: sound, sight, touch, smell and taste.
Thank you
Audioception (hearing): the poet can hear tings in his dream.
And I keep hearing from the cellar bin
The rumbling sound
Of load on load of apples coming in.
The dream is so realistic that you feel like you're right there with him in the orchard. Again, vivid use of imagery.
We can see that the poet is not completing all that he is supposed to, i.e. he "didn't fill" a barrel and he "didn't pick" some apples, that he was supposed to.
He states, in the most direct terms yet, that he is sick of picking apples.
These lines create a vivid image in the reader's mind of what the scenery truly looks like.
For I have had too much
Of apple-picking: I am overtired
Of the great harvest I myself desired.
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.
Not only means that he is going to stop apple picking now, but it also connotes the fact that he is getting tired of this job of apple picking.
No longer yearns, no has the aptitude to do what he used to do so excessively.
Hyperbole: 10 million apples. A bit much?
goes back to the extended metaphor slide, which compares the winter sleep, to an eternal sleep.
It is nighttime: causes reader to reevaluate what he has read, as apple picking is a daytime activity. (i.e. poem is set at nighttime, not daytime)
There were ten thousand thousand fruit to touch,
Cherish in hand, lift down, and not let fall.
For all
That struck the earth,
No matter if not bruised or spiked with stubble,
Went surely to the cider-apple heap
As of no worth.
Essence of winter sleep is on the night,
The scent of apples: I am drowsing off.
tired
Also gives another reason for why he is tired of apple picking
As with any activity that involves picking from plants, the process grows really old really fast. It's very monotonous.
written in blank verse
“After Apple-Picking” is not free verse, but it is among Frost’s least formal works.
line 5: bough = a main branch of a tree
line 8: drowsing = to be half asleep
line 10: pane = a single sheet of glass in a window or door
line 11: trough = a long, narrow open container for animals to eat or drink out of
line 12: hoary = greyish white (colour)
line 20: fleck = a very small patch of colour or light
line 20: russet = reddish brown in colour
line 31: cherish = hold (something) dear
line 35: cider = an alcoholic drink made from fermented apple juice
line 40: woodchuck = a rodent of the family Sciuridae, belonging to the group of large ground squirrels known as marmots
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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.
I feel the ladder sway as the boughs bend.
And I keep hearing from the cellar bin
The rumbling sound
Of load on load of apples coming in.
For I have had too much
Of apple-picking: I am overtired
Of the great harvest I myself desired.
There were ten thousand thousand fruit to touch,
Cherish in hand, lift down, and not let fall.
For all
That struck the earth,
No matter if not bruised or spiked with stubble,
Went surely to the cider-apple heap
As of no worth.
One can see what will trouble
This sleep of mine, whatever sleep it is.
Were he not gone,
The woodchuck could say whether it's like his
Long sleep, as I describe its coming on,
Or just some human sleep.
The poem's shorter lines are there to syncopate and sharpen the steady, potentially droning rhythm of the iambic pentameter and iambic hexameter lines.
Summary of lines 9-13:
The night is cold, cold enough for the top layer of water in the trough to freeze over. It turns into a sheet of ice. The poet "skimmed" it, meaning he removed the ice from the surface of the water. He then proceeds to hold it up and look through the slate of ice, into the ice borne world beyond. The speaker saw the frost-covered ("hoary") grass, distorted by the mirror ("glass") of the ice. Finally the ice starts to melt, due to the warmth of the poet's hands that are holding the ice sheet. The poet lets it "fall and break" against the ground.
Through the use of blank verse and no rhyme scheme (i.e. AABBCC, or ABABCDCD, etc.), and the irregularities of line length, Frost manages to evoke a mood of hesitation and drowsiness, as if the speaker were about to drop off to sleep and no longer in full control of his thoughts. Effectively, these features elicit an almost staggering effect to "After Apple-Picking", as if the speaker was literally wavering with fatigue.
Read after Slide 9, paragraph 1.
Note: the irregularities of line length and rhyme scheme are very uncommon for a Frost poem, and thus, they are noteworthy.
"trouble" implies that the dreams that he will have are of an unpleasant nature. This makes the reader think, as the dreams he is about to have is of apples and apple picking. This raises different question, predominantly, "Why is he having nightmares about the job he does"?
He has tried to "rub" it from his sight, like you might rub the sleep out of your eyes in the morning. However, it doesn't seem to have worked.
Vision is strange due to the fact that he looked the slate of ice. It can be compared to him looking through a distorted lens.
One can see what will trouble
This sleep of mine, whatever sleep it is.
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.
Poet expresses uncertainty about what kind of sleep he will have.
Before the poet falls into his deep sleep, all the sensory images are pleasant, but they have become distorted, as if the pleasant dream could become a nightmare, partly because of the fact that he was looking at the world through the lens of a "mirror of ice" (line 10).
Lines 18-26 of the poem, could be considered the dream state stage.
We can interpret the poem as a metaphor for the impending death of the subject.
"Examples of Seasonal Symbolism | The Classroom | Synonym." The Classroom. N.p., n.d. Web. 10 Aug. 2015. http://classroom.synonym.com/examples-seasonal-symbolism-22272.html
The lessons of “After Apple-Picking” could be applied to almost any life project which one loves and enjoys but finds exhausting. For Frost himself, the poem most likely is intended to describe his feelings about poetry, after writing it over a period of years.
“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,”
"ulteriority": hidden meaning
Fatigue: Reinforcing the impression of fatigue is the sense of disorientation which affects his senses: Images of smell, sight, movement, hearing and touch are all used in the poem. The old man's vision is compared to looking at the world around us through a thin sheet of ice (line 10) which is distorted and clouded. He has been off the ladder for a while, but he still can feel its rungs under his feet (lines 21-22) as well as its swaying. The apples he will see in his dreams are distorted and magnified to show every mark (line 18). Through all these sensory emotions dotted around the poem, the reader gets a sense of how and why the poet is fatigued.
Animal that hibernates.
The entire poem is a kind of extended metaphor, in which the activity of harvesting apples doesn't represent solely the act of picking apples, but the harvesting of human effort and reflection of life's cumulative work.
This poem was written when Frost was thirty-nine. The poem seems to represent an old man’s feelings. The poem was composed in 1913, immediately after A Boy’s Will (1913), his first book, had been published. The book had come out after many years of struggle and had received little favourable notice. It is debatable/ possible that “After Apple-Picking” may have been a response to that disappointment, and furthermore, it could have been a way to express his uncertainty about his future as a poet.
"Themes and Meanings (Critical Guide to Poetry for Students)." eNotes.com. N.p., n.d. Web. 12 Aug. 2015.
Were he not gone,
The woodchuck could say whether it's like his
Long sleep, as I describe its coming on,
Or just some human sleep.
But I was well
Upon my way to sleep before it fell,
And I could tell
What form my dreaming was about to take.
Connotes death
The language also supports the sense that the experience being described has become excessive: “There were ten thousand thousand fruit to touch,/ Cherish in hand, lift down, and not let fall.”
We can now assume that with the final period of the poem, the poet has fallen asleep.
The poet wishes that he could sleep for a long time, whether it be because he is tired and needs to regain and regenerate his energy, due to the endless days of tough work, or because he is tired of life and wishes to hibernate for eternity.
Ready to fall into the world of dreaming.
Now we find out that he is on his way to sleep, so that makes the reader question the previous 5 lines that he read. Line 8 says that he is "drowsing off".
Vivid imagery is used by the poet to illustrate an image of what he is seeing in his dream.
Magnified apples appear and disappear,
Stem end and blossom end,
And every fleck of russet showing clear.
Extreme detail of objects, (i.e. he can make out almost everything there is to see) for a simple dream.
Robert Frost and his family moved to England in 1912 because he felt that his poetic talent was not being recognized in America. Both the poems belong within this time frame. The key point which is common to both poems is the sense of nostalgia. Frost feels the loss of the American countryside.
Secondly, both poems are characterized by uncertainty about the poet's future.
Thirdly, both poems follow different rhythmic patterns and rhyme schemes, clearly indicating that Frost was experimenting and innovating and trying to find his feet in the world of poetry.
Finally, both "Birches" and "After Apple-Picking", poems are filled with vivid imagery. "Birches" is centered around the crackling image of the tall, majestic trees "loaded with ice a sunny winter morning after a rain," and a lonesome young boy swinging on them, riding them to the sky and back down again. In "After Apple Picking," Frost describes "magnified apples...stem end and blossom end...every fleck of russet showing clear," as well as the "instep arch" of his foot, which "aches" as it "keeps the pressure of a ladder-round."
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.
In "After-Apple Picking", we can detect a reflective tone that is both satisfied and somber. These underpin the poem's themes of nostalgia and self-reflection.
The language used by Frost within the poem, conveys the sense of someone speaking aloud. The richness of the imagery, reinforcing the drowsiness of the speaker’s mood, also contributes to this effect.
My instep arch not only keeps the ache,
It keeps the pressure of a ladder-round.
I feel the ladder sway as the boughs bend.