Quite possibly the most underrated American poet, Robert Frost's accessibility and deceptively simple themes tend to be overlooked by fancy pants academics. Mention him at a cocktail party and you're likely to be laughed out of the room for being provincial. Okay, I've never actually been to a cocktail party, but I'm guessing that's how it would go down. Anyway, "After Apple Picking" rocks my face off because of its veiled allusions to death, the conceit of The Fall (Original Sin) intertwined with the imagery of the season of fall, and that random woodchuck business at the end. One of my professors pointed out that the word "woodchuck" is an Ojibway or Cree word meaning "fisher." So, there you have it.Besides, it's cheaper (and more artistically dramatic) to drink at home.
Robert Frost
"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.
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.
