While I don't claim to do him justice, I really enjoy Robert Frost. This is the last paper I wrote before feeling too tired, too conflicted, and too broke to continue grad school.
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The Weariness of Self-Discovery in "After Apple-Picking"
Robert Frost's "After Apple-Picking" conjures immediate images: the clouding fatigue after a hard day's work, the bone-tiredness after a season of effort. There is also the obvious comparison of nature drifting from autumn to winter just as a person grows older and rests on their personal harvest of achievement. All of these possibilities catalogued and set aside, "picking apples" may also represent a period of questing for enlightenment. Frost, an admirer of Emerson and the transcendental movement, understood the expression of spiritual quest through the medium of nature (Bagby 382). This poem goes a little further, however, by contemplating the aftermath of a youth spent aggressively in search of self.
Although the type of "forbidden fruit" picked by Adam and Eve is not specified in the Bible, the apple – despite possibly being an illogical agricultural choice – has long been associated with the story. On a simplified level, reaching for a fruit from the "Tree of Knowledge" is akin to reaching for answers. In "After Apple-Picking," the narrator may be reaching the midway point of his life, with the first devoted to deliberately seeking new experiences and developing a sense of self. Although it would be problematic to assume that a poem's speaker is the same as its author, it is worthwhile to note that Frost was in his early 40s when the poem was published, and soon after publication he moved from England, where he spent a significant amount of time achieving his notoriety, back to the United States, where he remained for the rest of his life. Perhaps in 1915 the poet was ending his "apple-picking" season, and this poem responds to an urge to stop pushing, to settle down with the results of those experiences. Frost was a spiritual man: his on-again off-again membership in the Swedenborgian church demonstrates that he was not adverse to questioning his beliefs, and that he left the church by 1923 but still spoke highly of it may indicate that he chose to become more passive in his spiritual life (Bagby 380).
Thus, the poem opens with the image of the ladder – long, two-pointed – resting against a tree, and pointing toward heaven, forming what Liebman describes as a bridge between heaven and earth (421). Presumably the narrator has climbed the ladder many times, each journey up representing an attempt to get closer to a higher plane, and each picked apple the result of a grasp for inner wisdom. Although the ladder remains in this position, the narrator is no longer standing on it. He can still see the way to self-discovery, but he chooses to no longer climb it. Meanwhile, the phrase "my long two-pointed ladder" conjures an image of legs outstretched. When combined with the stubborn claim "But I am through with apple-picking now," this image can take the shape of a man with his legs outstretched, figuratively "sticking his feet out," still connected to heaven, but petulantly determined that he is done with the effort of climbing the ladder (line 6).
Beside the ladder is the barrel, its empty space those experiences left untried by the narrator, also represented by the apples left on the bough. Despite not having sampled everything, he felt he has done enough, and the scent of apples is now lulling him into sleep. Frost considered himself a synecdochist, according to Bagby, who sees an example of this in the scent of apples standing for the whole of winter sleep (381, 385). If autumn's apples are the "essence of winter sleep," this underscores the necessary relationship between the labor and exhaustion, experience and jadedness. As tired as the narrator is of picking apples, he could not be soothed by a long rest without having gone through that task. Likewise, a person cannot be jaded of their experiences without having deliberately satiated themselves on that which they now wish to avoid. In this way, rejection implies accomplishment, and to be through with apple-picking is not to speak against it any more than to be tired of oneself is to be self-loathing.
Continuing with the position that this narrator is ready to stop picking, to stop growing, and to settle into more sedentary habits, naming the ice in the drinking trough as a "pane of glass" is especially apt. Frost writes:
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. (9-12)
Glass provides a mirror; to look through the glass is to look through one's own reflection. The narrator holds his reflection to the ground, the basis of his surroundings, and when filtered through his nature, everything looks old, or "hoary." From his perspective, the world looks "done;" he has experienced enough of it. His youthful enthusiasm for revelation is now replaced with this "strangeness" of something approaching boredom, or at least extreme familiarity, and he cannot return to his former way of examining life. His means of reflection starts to melt away, but he deliberately lets it fall, either to break the spell or hasten the inevitable as he counters:
But I was well
Upon my way to sleep before it fell
And I could tell
What form my dreaming was about to take. (14-17)
Paton claims that Frost makes subtle changes in verb tense in order to create an uncertain mood of befuddlement similar to one resulting from exhaustion (49). If the "dreaming" in line 17 is meant to describe the physical act, this may be true. However, it is also possible that the dreaming will be those thoughts in the narrator's mind that will come during the period of rest from apple-picking, or self-discovery, that he calls sleep. From the moment he looks into the pane of glass and sees an old world, he gets an idea of what the future has in store. Instead of excitedly climbing the metaphorical ladder to seize those apples of experience, he understands that he must now face pondering all the choices he made, all the fruits he picked.
Lines 18 to 26 transmit a description of this coming "dream," beginning with the magnified apples that appear and disappear. The narrator may believe he will find himself looking closely at the decisions that made up his younger life, magnifying them for high points and flaws with the wiser scrutiny of distance. "Stem end and blossom end," he will consider each one carefully, and hindsight being 20/20, "every fleck of russet" will indeed show "clear" (19-20). He will dream of his apples the way one who works hard all day at a single task may come home to dream through its motions all night. The narrator has spent a significant portion of his life seeking enlightenment; now, the act of understanding himself need no longer be a deliberate pursuit; he can, as the saying goes, "do it in his sleep."
Returning to the ladder, although the narrator is no longer picking apples, his foot will "keep the ache" of standing on the ladder and trying to balance it. The bruises and exertions of his previous life are permanent. This is why "I keep hearing from the cellar bin / The rumbling sound / Of load on load of apples coming in" (24-26). It does not matter when he stops picking the apples; the picked fruit must still be addressed. To follow those lines with "For I have had too much / Of apple-picking" implies that he has set many processes into motion that will not stop for the foreseeable future (27-28). So much hounding of self-discovery now means he is helpless against being self-aware, of having apples endlessly magnify and tumble in his thoughts.
This narrator takes full responsibility for his actions, though. Instead of framing the apple-picking as necessary or unavoidable labor, he only calls it "the great harvest I myself desired" (29). It is common sense to assume that any farmer would welcome a large crop, but Frost's use of the reflexive pronoun coupled with a verb of passionate connotation, "desire," draws attention to the narrator's personal zeal for the rewards of his work. Furthermore, he does not say that he is tired of the act of apple-picking, which would again be a reasonable enough thought of anyone who has ever spent more than an hour moving a ladder from tree to tree and carefully reaching into boughs to remove the fruit. No, this speaker is tired of the harvest he desired, with special note to the past tense. He is not only tired, either, but overtired. It has not been the quest that has wearied him, but the grail.
The narrator notes that "there were ten thousand thousand fruit to touch," an overwhelming number of experiences to carefully and gratefully explore, to "cherish in hand, lift down, and not let fall" (30-31). Inevitably, some apples have to be forsaken. Frost would return to this difficult choice a few years later with "The Road Not Taken," where the narrator must leave behind one path in order to travel another, for one cannot walk every path just as one cannot pick all of the apples. Furthermore, not every apple he picked was treated with care. Some he let fall, and although they were not "bruised or spiked with stubble," their fate was still to be treated "as of no worth" (34, 36). It would be a rare and already enlightened individual who nurtured every opportunity and let none slip through the fingers; meanwhile, it is surely a universal concern of humans to not fully value every experience offered. There is nothing wrong with these fallen apples, just as there may be nothing wrong with a person whose friendship is uncultivated or a job that is turned down in favor of another, but if they do not serve the narrator's self, then their value is only an intellectual potential.
To pick one hundred apples is to not pick one hundred others. To leap after one experience is to abandon its opposite. "One can see what will trouble / This sleep of mine" says the speaker (37-38). He will now live with his choices, his "sleep" referencing the proverbial bed he has made. Even so, as jaded as he is, he does not know what form the sleep will take. Will it be like the woodchuck's hibernation, a significantly long period of time devoted to recuperation and reconciliation? Or is it "just some human sleep" (42)? Is the narrator merely overtired, as he says, and has reached the state of befuddlement argued above by Paton? There he may encounter the darker, restless side of "apple-picking" that will not let his mind sleep, forcing it to keep examining the apples. Perhaps the human sleep that ends the poem is a typical Frost aphorism (Bagby 388). It may only be the adage that everything looks better in the morning, free of the previous night's demons, and the narrator will carry on as before.
Works Cited
Bagby, Jr., George F. "Frost's Synecdochism." American Literature 58 (1986): 379-392.
Frost, Robert. "After Apple-Picking." Bartleby.com. 1 July 2006. <http://www.bartleby.com/118/>.
Liebman, Sheldon W. "Robert Frost, Romantic." Twentieth Century Literature 42 (1996): 417-437.
Paton, Priscilla M. "Robert Frost: 'The Fact is the Sweetest Dream that Labor Knows.'" American Literature 53 (1981): 43-55.
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