Of course, it also represents, as does the whole masterful structure of the poem, Frost's own precise control of tone, as he creates a speaker who is precariously "upon [his] way to sleep." Beside it, and there may be two or three. The perfume of the apples - equated through "essence" with profound rest - has the narcotic, almost sensual effect of ether. Copyright © 1988 by the UP of Kentucky. (Lines 1, 2, 14, 16, 18, 19, 25, 27, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 39, and 42 vary from the pentameter; only lines 18 and 34 are extra-syllabic.) Presumably men do not go into physical hibernation for months. Frost capitalises on the reflective tone and attempts to use nature as a source of value and meaning within his life. Magnified apples appear and disappear, From Robert Frost: The Work of Knowing. There is both daring and genius in the lines that follow: "But I was well/ Upon my way to sleep before it fell." The intensity of labor has brought him in touch with a vocabulary of "apples," "trees," "scent," "ladders," "harvests," of ascents and descents that make it impossible for him not to say one thing in terms of another. . Darwin's Tree of Life represents both nature's diversity as well as the common descent and destiny of all living creatures including man. As he has described that sleep coming on, indeed, the speaker clearly has been speaking contraries. The irony beyond this curse is Frost's subject. From the outset, nature seems to have become alien to the speaker. When at the very outset the apple-picker remembers "My long two-pointed ladder's sticking through a tree," he is, without any self-consciousness, committed by "natural facts" to a mythological or symbolic statement, as he is immediately thereafter in the further "fact" that the ladder is pointing "toward heaven still." In his rambling somnolence, his driftings among the terms of his own obsessive experience, the apple-picker is "thinking" only less consciously than is the poet in his more directly exploratory use of language. The erratic movement of the apples, certainly, may be quite consistent with the nature of this dream, one experienced when awake. The progress or movement of analogy brings us to something beyond it, like faith or a belief. Indeed, Frost's apple picker, "overtired / Of the great harvest" he has himself desired, has made the Thoreauvian mistake of being "so occupied with the factitious cares and superfluously coarse labors of life that its finer fruits cannot be plucked by them. “The Buying Decisions of ‘Consumers’ On the Use of Microsoft or Apple Products” Submitted By: SANUSI SANI BUHARI Student No: 200922R7018 The Dissertation has been submitted to the Skyline University. In "After Apple-Picking," the ladder only points toward heaven. The "two-pointed ladder" figures as both the instrument and the technology of tropism toward "heaven" that ultimately leads to the oneiric hell of uncertainty and of waste and struggle. Dualism is replaced by an almost religious sense of unity here; and the tone of irony, quizzical reserve, completely disappears in favour of wonder and incantation. Obviously, the "woodchuck" could not "say" anything, and its capacity to make a metaphoric discrimination between its own and human sleep is rendered comic by the speaker's ascription to himself of the power only to "describe" the coming on of sleep. 3 Stylistic peculiarities of D. H. Lawrence and H. W. Longfellow’s poetry……………………………………………………………………. Of apple-picking: I am overtired Of the great harvest I myself desired. If the speaker is divorced from nature, then what would "just some human sleep" be? "Essence" is inextricably tied to matter and to sleep, "the scent of apples" and " drowsing off." I cannot rub the strangeness from my sight Long sleep, as I describe its coming on, From Robert Frost and the New England Renaissance. It is, also, a ladder that is not "pulled in"; it is "still" - "still" there, "still" to be climbed again, and "still" pointing as if, despite its being "long," it merely directs us to a place toward which it provides the initial steps. So wonderfully does the language of the poem subvert any easy regulation that some readers might want to think of the "perfume" in Herbert's "life" or in King's "Contemplation upon Flowers" or in Frost's own "Unharvested" which emanates from a soul that has sanctified itself. It melted, and I let it fall and break. . In that weary, drowsy poem the speaker longs to escape through art, symbolized by the nightingale, from the pain of the real world and wants to melt into the welcome oblivion of death: My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains Does this poem have a "symbolic" meaning, or is it just a straightforward poem about apple-picking? The long and short lines, the irregular rhyme scheme, the recurrent participles (indicating work), the slow tempo and incantatory rhythm all suggest that repetitive labor has drained away his energy. In Lyric Time Sharon Cameron has pointed out that the speaker's dreaming, begun before the event of the poem, appears to begin again during the poem and announces its recommencement sometime after the poem. The poem describes a pastoral scene of New England life in autumn, characteristic of Frost's early work. But the point of the reference to the woodchuck is not simply to create a contrast between a human and an animal sleep but also to introduce an implied comparison—an inexact analogy between the speaker's sleep and the sleep of nature. And there's a barrel that I didn't fill. The poem includes many of these characteristics and ultimately "it depicted emotional matter, in an imaginative form". 9. or else it completes a rhyme used earlier and with one exception not used again: The rhymes of the first type link stanza to stanza. After Apple Picking is the poem that links Frost heavily to the Romantic Tradition as he follows the traditional Romantic model, in which he displays a number of Romantic qualities, mainly a connection with the transcendent and spiritual, Individualism, Primitivism and Nature as a source of reflection and guidance. Essence of winter sleep is on the night, The scent of apples: I am drowsing off. . about Richard Poirier: On "After Apple-Picking", about Jeffrey Meyers: On "After Apple-Picking", about John J. Conder: On "After Apple-Picking", about Reuben A. Brower: On "After Apple-Picking", about Robert Faggen: On "After Apple-Picking", about Katherine Kearns: On "After Apple-Picking", about Richard Gray: On "After Apple-Picking", about George Montiero: On "After Apple-Picking", Richard Poirier: On "After Apple-Picking", Reuben A. Brower: On "After Apple-Picking", Katherine Kearns: On "After Apple-Picking", George Montiero: On "After Apple-Picking". A fine free verse poem about apple picking, which Frost probably did on his own farm. "After Apple-Picking" has often been compared to Keats’ "Ode to Autumn," as if it were primarily a celebration of harvest. It is characteristic of Frost that the 'sentencing' and the sense are surely controlled, that daylight accuracy and daylight humor are present in statement and tone. The strain was drawn from Frosts’ confess specialality, his reiterated losses, everyday tasks, and his barrenness. He feels himself beginning to dream but cannot escape the thought of his apples even in sleep: he sees visions of apples growing from blossoms, falling off trees, and piling up in the cellar. Insofar as this reading rejects death and immortality as one possible form of sleep in "After Apple-Picking," the commentary is consistent with a general opinion that Frost is nonteleological in his thought. My instep arch not only keeps the ache, Although Frost allows for its possibility in the reference to the woodchuck, such a sleep seems inconsistent with his larger view of man and nature. The sensuous pull of the earth overcomes the speaker: Though claiming some mystery in "the strangeness" he "got from looking through a pane of glass," the speaker reminds us that this looking glass is but a temporary instrument and inextricable part of the fluidity from which it came: a drinking trough used for bodily rather than spiritual sustenance. As in much of Frost's prose the syntax here is aggressively vernacular and irregular, and the effect is to make the word "in" a part of the verb. "After Apple Picking" is among the most beautiful poems Frost ever composed. For when desire fails and values falter, what source outside the self can restore desire? Both of them are lost. The eyelids blink shut, and the speaker sees apples. . The dreamy confusion of the rhythm, the curiously 'echoing' effect of the irregular, unpredictable rhyme scheme, the mixing of tenses, tones, and senses, the hypnotic repetition of sensory detail: all these things promote a transformation of reality that comes, paradoxically, from a close observation of the real, its shape, weight, and fragrance, rather than any attempt to soar above it: Magnified apples appear and disappear,  His 'ladder's sticking through a tree'—which is accurate and earthy—but 'through a tree / Toward heaven.' But I am done with apple-picking now. I skimmed this morning from the drinking trough Indeed, as he had written earlier in Walden, the problem was that "men labor under a mistake. The scent of apples: I am drowsing off. It is a proud poem, as if its very life depends upon a refusal to justify itself by any open evidence of what it is up to. The parallel between his drowsiness and the "essence of winter sleep" is, at best, tenuous, held together by an uncommitted colon in the last line of the statement, "Essence of winter sleep is on the night, / The scent of apples: I am drowsing off." The scent of apples: I am drowsing off. We are also happy to take questions and suggestions for future materials. I skimmed this morning from the drinking trough So confused are states of consciousness here that perhaps we are to think that he slept all through the day of work, perhaps he dreamed the day itself, with its "hoary grass." The closing metaphor of the poem, the woodchuck's 'long sleep,' adds to the strangeness of 'winter sleep' by bringing in the non-human death-like sleep of hibernation. Upon my way to sleep before it fell, The penetrating power of labor can be evinced in "apple-picking" or in writing or reading about it, and any one of these activities brings us close to seeing how apples and all that surround them can be symbolic of spirit. The image of the ladder will evoke that of Jacob's dream as well as Emerson's more metaphysical use of that ladder in "Experience." It is therefore not surprising that, after considering , the apples ''as of no worth," the apple picker wonders about the relation of his own "sleep," a metaphor for loss of control and death in our self-consciousness, to that of another creature, "the woodchuck," for whom sleep hibernation is at least protection against the environment: The apple picker, however, turns to another creature at the end of his labor only in hope of finding a way out of his troubling isolation and fears—and there may be no way out of what he can "describe." The paper deals with the Apple turnaround and the role of Steve Jobs in it. Doubts related to questions of value are in his mind as he recounts his apple-picking, so it is not surprising that the dream induced by his venture reflects his confusion. But the speaker may need, for renewal, not simply rest, some period of dormancy, but also some certain knowledge of human values. Given the feats of association that he makes, given the fact that he speaks in contraries, the speaker's attitude toward his sleep is far more complicated than at first seems clear, and his trouble far more real than might be supposed. [he] said, nearly. The rest of the poem moves away from heaven, which has been the theological place of perfection, to meditation on exhaustion from contemplation of the world's immense ungraspability, its superfecundity and waste. Romantic literature tends to have a theme of favouring the pastoral over the urban way of living. It is as if he woke before work into a kind of reality that had all the strangeness of dream, and he looks to sleep after work almost in the hope of dispelling the dream: I am drowsing off. And every fleck of russet showing clear. 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. The phrasing has a Marvellian reticence, only a bit less pronounced than in "The Silken Tent" where the "central cedar pole" is "its pinnacle to heavenward.". I feel the ladder sway as the boughs bend. The tone of After Apple-Picking created the theme of the poem. If the fallen apples are as "of no worth," then he hints, the harvest itself is as of great worth, a description which implies its opposite. After that famous picking in the Garden, human life, awake or sleeping, has been a dream, and words are compacted of the myths we have dreamt of the fall and redemption of souls. . . Each phase of reminiscence or reflection forms a unit of syntax, all except two without a final stop within the unit; and each unit becomes in effect a stanza marked off by one or two rhyming 'seals.' After Apple-picking is one of Frost's seemingly simple poems which grows deeper with later readings. What is required is toil and labor, the exertion of body and mind necessary to bring anything to birth. Ironically enough, only when he awakens will he know what sleep it is—or, rather, was. After Apple-Picking. Thus, "essence" can mean something abstract, like an attribute, or even a spirit that is fundamental to winter nights, and it is also something very specific to apple-picking, the perfume of a harvest. Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 1988. The poem was drawn from Frosts' own life, his recurrent losses, everyday tasks, and his loneliness. Although the trouble and the "sleep" are intimately connected in the lines, for purposes of analysis it is best to keep them separate. . makes itself felt even as it capitulates to its own variable nature. After Apple Picking focused on ones deep feelings of suffering but also a sense of hope and transcendence. But it is not at all certain that his is the sleep of renewal. We use cookies to give you the best experience possible. Frost's narrator, standing on the earth but looking upward, is also suspended between the real and the dream world: My long two-pointed ladder's sticking through a tree To tell them is to set their feet on the first rung of a ladder the top of which sticks through the sky.". It is also characteristic that the figure of sound grows from a metaphorical center. 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 Simply put, he "desired" a "great harvest," and the desire was sufficiently strong to justify extraordinary discipline and control: "There were ten thousand thousand fruit to touch, / Cherish in hand, lift down, and not let fall." The poem 'After Apple Picking' by Robert Frost is one the most celebrated and widely read poems of the Romantic Period. If nature can renew itself automatically, man, viewed as distinct from nature, cannot be assured of such renewal. Such a sleep, induced by physical and mental fatigue, is not a function of man's uncertain values. His ladder is pointed toward heaven only, and he has had to descend from it. Of the great harvest I myself desired. and shut your eyes," wrote Emerson, "you shall still see apples hanging in the bright light." Executive Summary on Apple computer Their fingers, from excessive toil, are too clumsy and tremble too much for that. I cannot rub the strangeness from my sight "After Apple Picking" keeps resolutely returning to pentameter lines, but the speaker is drowsy, and the opening twelve-syllable line - "My long two-pointed ladder's sticking through a tree" - is like the last murmured words before sleep. . Frost: Centennial Essays. Copyright © 1963 by Reuben A. Brower. eNotes critical analyses help you gain a deeper understanding of After Apple-Picking so you can excel on your essay or test. If the speaker's encounter with the apples has led him to question not just the nature, but the source of his values, then, hi sleep may be longer, even permanent. say whether it's like his / Long sleep, as I describe its coming on, / Or just some human sleep," the speaker's avowal to the contrary apparently reduces the conclusion to mere whimsy. This sleep of mine, whatever sleep it is. Those suggestions become explicit in the contrast between the sleep of the woodchuck and "just some human sleep." Apples I didn’t pick upon some bough. . This is in part what is signified by Emerson's paradigm at the beginning of "Language" in Nature: "1. The "two-pointed ladder" figures as both the instrument and the technology of tropism toward "heaven" that ultimately leads to the oneiric hell of uncertainty and of waste and struggle. 2 The meaning implied by the self-hypnosis and dreamy confusion of rhythm is finely suggested in the image of 'the world of hoary grass,' the blurred seeing of morning that anticipates the night vision. The parallel tenuously established by the colon breaks down in the next section, which describes the strange sight of the winter world through a sheet of ice. The dramatic monologue, diction and modality shows the struggles of the man. The 'consent' in this instance is implied in the perfection of the form. . overtired / Of the great harvest I myself desired," such an analogy carries with it its own measure of reassurance. It keeps the pressure of the ladder-round. Toward heaven still, The rest of the second line, barely iambic, barely rhyming, casual and rough, assures us that the speaker has at least one toe in reality. The poem has become so familiar and revered that it is difficult to recognize its strangeness. . ) Of course, since the ice is melting, the gesture is perfectly normal. In a context where every word seems so much by nature to be metaphorical, "two-pointed" trembles with possibilities of meaning that adhere to its very essence. As he gives himself over to sleep, he wond… The speaker makes it eminently clear that he once highly valued his harvest. In the very desire to profit from his long hours of work, the poet has made himself vulnerable, in a wry sense, to the dictum that "the sleep of a labouring man is sweet, whether he eat little or much; but the abundance of the rich will not suffer him to sleep" (Ecclesiastes 5:12). 'I cannot rub the strangeness from my sight', says the narrator, and this strangeness, the 'essence of winter sleep', is something he shares with the reader. . Such an analogy, furthermore, would not be consistent with Frost's point of view, one which sharply differentiates man from nature. Men do. No matter if not bruised or spiked with stubble, Apples I didn't pick upon some bough.     One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk. The season of the year emphasizes nature's death, while the woodchuck's hibernation suggests a pattern of death and resurrection. And as the speaker moves toward an increasing intuition of the symbolic underpinnings of his exhaustion, which is the result not just of his picking apples but of other more visceral frustrations and fears, the frequency of these variations increases. We are finally quite uncertain of what is happening, and that is what the poem is about: One can see what will trouble A poem of reality, ‘After Apple-Picking’ has the enchantment of a lingering dream.’ Moreover, themes like Life, Death, and the Fall of man are treated by Frost in ‘After Apple-Picking’ through a number of systems. At worst, this sleep would be like nature's in its duration, though not in its character (unlike nature, man can dream). number: 206095338. A comparison between the dream and the activity is revealing for what the dream leaves out, and such a comparison must be based on the visual element in the dream, since all the other elements are ascribable to purely natural aftereffects and bear no symbolic relationship to the whole point of picking as many apples as possible: to reap a great harvest. If the faces God as Job did in the theophany or as Jacob did after wrestling at Peniel, it is an overwhelming and immediate physical manifestation of the facts of growth, "stem end and blossom end," as well as the "flecks of russet" and not the Pauline promise of seeing God spiritually face to face in the future. It glows, its russet flecks showing clear and its scent in the air, as potent as Snow White's apple, while the ice mirror has broken and the speaker is moving toward a hibernatory trance. And held against the world of hoary grass. "After Apple-Picking" is a poem by American poet Robert Frost.It was published in North of Boston, Frost's second poetry collection.The poem does not conform strictly to a particular form, though it is loosely iambic pentameter.. From Robert Frost: A Biography. What form my dreaming was about to take. "For to describe the fallen apples as "of no worth" is to imply their worth. . Save time and let our verified experts help you. In these two lines tone and rhythm work together beautifully, implying a great deal in relation to Frost's metaphor. A consciousness of a limited view and of a larger process of selection to which we are subjected is the darker fruit of our own knowledge. What are the "After Apple Picking" Themes or discuss Important Themes of Love, Life, Success, Accomplishment, Comfort and Death in the poem "After Apple Picking" : Love for the beauty of Nature in "After Apple Picking": This poem is a typical case depicting the rural and agrarian scenes from a poet that loves painting nature. By comparison, the ladder in "After Apple-Picking" is quite graphically vertical, and it points to a destination beyond itself. “After Apple-Picking” Quotes “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. The apples are unrelated to the speaker, moving of their own accord, without his direction, his sense of purpose. "Magnified apples" merges both the oneiric world of human desire and the scientific world of instrumental examination. How to solve: Is After Apple Picking a pastoral poem? "After Apple-Picking" is a poem by Robert Frost. The apple tree evokes the loss and displacement of the Fall—the Tree of Knowledge. Precisely because the implied comparison between the speaker's sleep and the woodchuck's is undone by the power of the contrast (men can only have a human sleep), the assurance offered by the comparison with nature is also retracted. The use of polysemanticism of the word in combination with. . Brower has written meticulously about its rhythmic form, but he has not let himself feel the deeper pulsations in its metaphors. When the penetration of "facts" or of matter occurs through labor, the laborer, who may also be the poet, becomes vaguely aware that what had before seemed solid and unmalleable is also part of a collective "dream" and partakes of myth. By comparison, the Apple tree evokes the loss and displacement of the harvest the reference the. 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