After Apple Picking

-Robert Frost
Frost as a poet
 Robert Frost was often talked about as if he were two different poets, or possibly even
two different people—a phenomenon that continues even now, half a century after his
death in 1963.
a. The first poet is the familiar New England icon, the salty, no-nonsense dispenser of
rustic wisdom whose lines have the sturdiness and warmth of hearthstones knelt upon
by generations of yeoman farmers. This Frost is the Robert Frost of the common
reader, the Frost of birches and fields and snow and spring pools. He writes plain
poems that make plain sense or seem to.
Those poems often rhyme, and when they do, they do so forthrightly (deep and sleep,
for instance). They are frequently about the quotidian lives of farmers, day labourers,
mill workers, and other small-time folk at the beginning of the twentieth century.
Their stanzas slat tidily together, like the corners of log cabins, and their most
memorable lines are the sort of homely epigrams you might find crocheted on throw
pillows:
“I took the one less travelled by”;
“Good fences make good neighbours”;
“But all the fun’s in how you say a thing.”
This Robert Frost feels a bit old-fashioned, maybe, but in the way that George
Washington seems old-fashioned, or pilgrim hats on Thanksgiving. He’s part of the
bedrock of the American identity.

b. The second Frost— “the other Frost,” as Randall Jarrell described him in 1953—is
nearly the opposite of the first. This Frost is dark, manipulative, and withholding. His
poems are often about madness or violence, and their seemingly stable surfaces are
sheets of ice through which the unwitting traveller can easily plunge into frigid water.

This Frost was no provincial farmer-poet, but rather a ruthlessly competitive and
immensely erudite artist who was far more widely travelled than peers often
considered more cosmopolitan, like Wallace Stevens.
This Frost is the Frost of the sophisticated reader and, more specifically, the academic
reader.
Understanding this Robert Frost usually entails rejecting the first Frost as pretence
(“the great act,” as Robert Lowell once labelled it). It often means rejecting the
audience who believes in that act as well. As the critic Lionel Trilling put it in a
birthday salute to Frost in 1959, “I have undertaken to say that a great many of your
admirers have not understood clearly what you have been doing in your life in
poetry.”
If the first Frost resembles one of the great carved heads of Mount Rushmore—half
monument, half kitsch, and accessible to anyone willing to pay for parking—the
second Frost often seems more like the surrounding Badlands, where only a fool
 travels without a guide. And between these two possibilities is an obscuring, dust
filled haze.

 He was hugely in demand as a lecturer and reader and began to develop the persona
that would become his trademark. Jay Parini, Frost’s most judicious biographer,
describes that role as “the slow-talking, witty, wisecracking, rueful, commonsensical,
quasi-philosophical man of letters—a carefully composed mask no less artful than
those constructed by Oscar Wilde or Mark Twain before him.” He seemed half sage,
half farmer.

 President Kennedy called the poet “one of the granite figures of our time,” adding,
“He was supremely two things: an artist and an American.”

 The defining feature of Frost’s poetry is its resistance to definitions, a near paradox
that Frost would have enjoyed. He thought of poems less as static objects than as
bodies in constant, athletic motion; as soon as you feel you have gotten a glimpse of
one aspect of the poem (and the poet), the lines pivot and the vision changes

 Eliot believed the experience of the reader should reflect the emotional intention of
the poet as by formula—by an “objective correlative”—even if the connection might
be obscure.
For instance, The Waste Land, with its scattered cultural rubble as a stand-in for the
poet’s own internal turmoil:
“These fragments I have shored against my ruins.”
Eliot might be difficult, but he is straightforwardly difficult.
Frost, on the other hand, wanted to “suggest formulae that won’t formulate—that
almost but don’t quite formulate.” Against a background of what he once called
“black and utter chaos,” he refused to defend a fixed position, relying instead on a
performer’s shape-shifting agility to avoid entanglements he couldn’t slip loose of,
including overly earnest entanglements with the reader. The relationship he sought
was premised instead on teasing, flirting, gamesmanship.
“Poetry,” as he once said, “provides the one permissible way of saying one thing and
meaning another.”

 Frost considers himself a symbolist in the Emersonian sense, “Scotch symbolist” (as
he was brought up within Swedenborgian doctrines). Most characteristically, Frost
considers himself neither emblemist nor symbolist but a synecdochist. “for I prefer
the synecdochein poetry- that figure of speech in which we use a part for the whole."
 In the lyrics themselves, Frost's synecdochism has many consequences. Local stylistic
manifestations frequently involve a kind of sophisticated punning in which a term
refers simultaneously to a literal object and to a broader, figurative reality-the sort of
thing we have already seen in Frost's use of "character" or "print." Amodel example
occurs in "After Apple-Picking," where "Essenceof winter sleep is on the night, / The
scent of apples." "Essence,"clearly, is not only the literal perfume, "The scent of
apples"; forFrost, that scent physically embodies, or synecdochically repre-sents, the
essential qualities of winter sleep, of the post-harveststate of mind with which the
 poem is concerned. The same kind ofsynecdochic pun is central to "Fragmentary
Blue." In the firststanza of the poem, "heaven" is used literally, meaning simply"sky":
"heaven presents in sheets the solid hue" of blue. But inthe second stanza (indeed in
the very next line) the word takes on an expanded, figurative meaning as Frost
answers his question why men should cherish that particular colour: "Since earth is
earth, perhaps, not heaven (as yet)." The play on "heaven" in the literal sense and
"heaven" in the figurative sense reflects precisely what the poem is about: the
relationship between earthly, "fragmentary blue" and the larger realm of spiritual
fulfilment which that blue synecdochically emblems.

 Comparable double meanings occur in the titles of two of Frost's volumes. A

"mountain interval" is both a literal "intervale" (a tract of low, open land between
mountains) and a momentary pause between imaginative climbings. (In fact, when
urged by a well-meaning friend to spell the word "intervale, "Frost insisted on
"interval" precisely because of "its double meaning.") And "a further range" is not just
a more distant group of mountains but also the further range of experience which they
image out.
 Literature Plays like these on "essence," "heaven," "interval," and “range" are not
superficial linguistic games; they all suggest that the physical part manifests a more
than physical whole.
 Influences- Thoreau, Emerson, Bryant

 Frost was a clear theologist. Except for T. S. Eliot, no poet of Frost's generation and
stature has a body of work so full of spiritual questioning, theological language, or
biblical allusion.

About After Apple Picking

 "After Apple-Picking" is theological from the start. It is, as its title implies, about
work, time, and change: about an earthly harvest and what follows. As it explores the
frustrations and rewards of labour, touching upon biblical texts, we find its references
to heaven and earth and its play on things fallen, lost, and saved to be anything but
casual

Biblical Allusions

 In a poem called "The Pulley," the seventeenth-century poet George Herbert depicts
God as bestowing on man all possible blessings but one, deliberately withholding rest
so that weariness will finally return him to his maker.

So, in "After Apple-Picking," the speaker "overtired / Of the great harvest I myself
desired" remains restless and unsatisfied in a world where completion eludes him. His
heaven-pointed ladder rises almost directly from the "barrel that I didn't fill beside it"
and from the "Apples I didn't pick upon some bough." Lost to human purpose, like the
cord of maple "far from a useful fireplace" in "The Wood-Pile," these ungathered
 apples merge with those that go "to the cider-apple heap / As of no worth." Even "if
not bruised or spiked with stubble," and even where it does not "touch the earth,"
autumn's fruit is touched by a sense of death.

 The incantatory rhythms, with rhymes at unexpected intervals, contribute to the

poem's special mood, at once magical, drowsy, and uneasy: an unsettled state between
waking and sleep--and between seasons--in which the unresolved nature of experience
takes on the character of dream. My particular point of entry is a five-line passage
which keeps us focused on a physical world while directing our vision inward and
elsewhere:

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

These lines gain part of their intrigue and power from their biblical allusions. Most
obvious, perhaps, is the echo of 1 Corinthians 13, in which Paul contrasts our
occluded earthly vision with that in the kingdom of God: "For now we see through a
glass, darkly; but then face to face." Bringing Paul's figure even more down-to-earth,
Frost's "pane of glass ... skimmed ... from a drinking trough" plays with the problem
of seeing a changing world through the medium of unstable things, including one's
own eyes.

But for Frost, as for Paul, the problems of mortal knowledge are those of mortality
itself the whole set of limitations we portray as our loss of Eden. Focusing on the
speaker's unrest at harvest's end, "After Apple- picking" confronts the partial nature of
earthly rewards and- in the ladder "sticking through a tree / Toward heaven still” our
persistent desire for something more. Frost, I would say, invokes 1 Corinthians less
for Paul's faith in a heavenly kingdom than for his longing- his wish for a world in
which things remote are brought near and we come home to satisfaction and love.
Frost's own verse is full of a longing for perfection or completion, and the
"strangeness" of sight left by the "pane" of ice is largely that of the ever-changing
world seen through mortal eyes: a world of distances and departures, in which nothing
is quite "face-to-face" and much eludes our essential selves.

D- Like the fragile ice, the grass coated with frost is an image both of fleeting
existence and seasonal change. And like Frost's "pane of glass," the phrase "hoary
grass" involves several biblical verses which contrast mortal life to God's eternity.
"All flesh is grass," says Isaiah, "while the word of our God shall stand forever"
(40.6,8). "I am withered
like grass," sings the psalmist, "But thou, O Lord, shalt endure" (Ps. 102.10-11). In
Psalm 103, man's "days are as grass: .../ For the wind passes over ... and the place ...
 shall know it no more" (15-16). Apparently in contemplation, Frost's speaker "holds"
his soon-to-be-broken lens "against" this world of change-between it and himself. But
how can anything mutable keep us from mutability? As he allows the perishability of
ice ("I let it fall and break"), so he knows his own descent: "But I was well / Upon my
way to sleep before it fell." Sleep signals mortal limits in the psalms as well, where "a
thousand years" is as "a sleep; ... like grass which ... in the evening is cut down and
withereth" (90.4-6)-this in the sight of a God who "will neither slumber nor sleep"
(121.4).

In the speaker's dream, "Magnified apples appear and disappear," rehearsing the plot
of mortality. Harvested apples worry him too, load on load ... "rumbling" toward the
cellar bin. And so he maintains the habit and impulse of ascent. His "instep arch not
only keeps the ache, / It keeps the pressure of a ladder-round" a curious distinction,
which reminds us how unrelenting, especially in imagination, is his push against the
pull of earth.

"I feel the ladder sway as the boughs bend": so far, but no further, can this speaker
give himself to nature. Like the ladder and his own reaching hand, his humanity (with
its dreams) precludes the woodchuck's surrender to earth's rhythms, epitomized by his
"long sleep," named for winter itself.8 Like the trees, the human striver feels a double
pull. Though anchored in earth, he moves with the wind, which in our three main
biblical tongues is also the movement of spirit9. He swings "between heaven and
earth," in the words of another troubled dreamer.

 Frost's allusions to biblical texts and spiritual concerns may seem surprising against
the commonplace features of farm and orchard, and the look, feel, smell, and sound of
apples. More remarkable, I find, is how naturally they arise from these details. For the
speaker's language, like his imagination, reaches through the concreteness of
experience which it celebrates, to spill over into something else. Just as the playful
skimming of the ice offers a glimpse into mortality, so, in "After Apple-Picking," one
thing leads to another. Thus while the biblical echoes rely on particular cues--the
coupling of "glass" and "through," the "hoary"-ness of the grass-- the way is prepared
by other effects: by the ladder pointing where it cannot reach, by the unfulfill at
harvest's end, and by the "strangeness" of vision which attaches to drowsiness, winter,
and night. Without this sense of mortality in the very sensations of mortal life, not
only might we miss Frost's more direct allusions. They would say something else. For
without Frost's own epiphanies, Paul (and the earlier biblical voices) might seem the
sources of a revelation to which Frost bears quite independent witness.

 Frost pane separates nothing but reveals a world of impingements where opposites-
reward and frustration, joy and grief, waking and sleep-tend to merge. And it reveals
by taking part. "[H]eld against the world of hoary grass," the pane is a window on
mortality through its own fall and melting, its fragile beauty telling the story of
 everything in that dazzling landscape, including the speaker himself. As he makes the
ice a lens, seeing his altered world more clearly through it, so he is altered by it: "I
cannot rub the strangeness from my sight." And besides his puzzlement in the face of
yet another natural change, is there not, too- in this sleepy orchard laborer waking to a
crystallized landscape- something of the wonder which Paul reserves for the world to
come: "Behold, I shew you a mystery; We shall not all sleep, but we shall be changed"
(1 Cor 15.51)

 For readers of actual poems in mortal time, such figures (glass) rehearse the
transience of things. They form and dissolve like the pane of ice, appear and recede
like the magnified apples in the speaker's dream. But, in receding, they leave us
changed, seeing further "into the life of things"12 and more connected to that life.
While Paul's mirror obscures what is fully seen only somewhere else, Frost's "pane of
glass," like the larger text of which it is part, opens up the only world we know,
engaging us more fully in the complexities of knowledge and truth.

 It is hard to say whether Frost rejects that perfect world as impossible or finally
undesirable, but reject it he does; or, rather, like Keats in his odes, he lets it go, to
embrace earth's confusions of time and change, which entangle growth with decline,
ripeness with death. “I’d like to get away from earth awhile” reads the full line from
“Birches.”

And then come back to it and begin over.

May no fate willfully misunderstand me
And half grant what I wish and snatch me away
Not to return. Earth's the right place for love.
I don't know where it's likely to go better.

 And there is the pressure of that ladder-round.

The coupling of love and pain that makes the "now" of earthly life almost
unendurable for Paul is what makes it bearable for Frost. Only "earnest love" redeems
the heat and sweat of "Mowing" as it lays the "swale in rows" and leaves "the hay to
make," revealing a blessing within the curse of labor, releasing the gold within the
ore. It is such love which, in "After Apple-Picking," brings out the glory of mortal
things: the magic of freezing and melting, "every fleck of russet" in the apples
themselves, the wonder of a single season's growth- "ten thousand thousand fruit to
touch / Cherish in hand." The cherishing in this ritual of toil merges the work of
survival with the charity, or love, born of shared mortality. Frost's earth is not the
earth of Paul's last days, about to vanish before God's eternity, but the earth we touch
and are touched by, which will return us to dust. In this way Frost's "now" is not the
"now" of Paul. Yet the love it asks is very much the same.

 Frost's habit of juxtaposing triviality with profundity is legend (Ferguson 42)

 Regardless of its particular meanings, "After Apple Picking" has been long viewed, in
the words of Cleanth Brooks, as "an admirable piece of description" (Brooks 363).
The poem possesses a stylistic richness unique, it seems, in American poetry. Because
he placed the poem at the centre of his second book, North of Boston, Frost
undoubtedly held it in special regard. And the poet, much later in life, in talks with his
Ripton friend Rabbi Victor Reichert, invoked the poem's perduring metaphor in
discussing the nature of faith: "With so many ladders going up everywhere, there must
be something for them to lean against" (Thompson and Winnick 439). When read as
an inspired human dream, but also as a troubled divine vision, "After Apple Picking"
yields more of the extraordinary range and depth of its genuine complexity. The
poem, accordingly, radiates a vision of remarkable insight when understood as Frost's
boldly imaginative design to let itself be read as human speech begetting divine
discourse.

Biblical
 Frost’s poem, as we know, describes an exhausted apple-picker, finished with a long
day's work, heading home to rest, himself more than ready for sleep having "that
morning" already envisioned "what form" his dream "was about" to take (17). The
dream, therefore, becomes the pivotal event in the poem. Also, it obviously owes to
Genesis 28, Jacob's extraordinary dream at Bethel. In Jacob's vision, we recall, Jacob
"dreamed, and behold a ladder set up on the earth, and the top of it reached to heaven"
(12); God within the vision addresses the reclining Jacob, revealing what is to come:
the generations and nations promised Jacob and his progeny. Moved by his dream,
Jacob awakens responsive to God's promise to him of plenitudes of life and land; and
he then proclaims, "Surely the Lord is in this place and I knew it not" (16). We cannot
be sure what "this place" means. The dream? The physical space of the dreamer? The
created world? All of these?

 The dreamer's angle of vision, however, is another matter. The perspective of Jacob's
vision, we come to realize, is God's paradoxical vision of mankind's fruitful fate,
channeled back to God through Jacob. From the seed of the forbidden fruit come the
cherished or uncherished fruit of mankind whose final harvesting will become God's
obligation...God's final labor. What God reveals to Jacob, in effect, represents the
basis by which God's own judgment of mankind will proceed. In Frost's view, the
work of God's inevitable final judgment, however perfected through the Saviour,
remains the consequence, the fruition, of God's own sentence upon Adam and Eve to
endure lives of painful labor in their remaining days on earth. Frost, extending the
theme of human toil in Genesis, has his dreamer enact that fated labor but also
envision the "great harvest" that suggests the grand labor of God's last judgment. But
there is more, of course. Frost sees God, contradistinctly, having to serve out the
sentence He had meted out to man: from the toil of man's labor and his seed will come
God's far greater labor of dealing with its fruition. God's laborious judgment of
Jacob's "seed" then takes the form, in Frost's poem, of the "picking" of the ripened
fruit-once the peril but now the full issue of mankind. Envisioning "the great harvest"
(29), God, speaking through Frost's "overtired" apple-picker, recalls His burdensome
mission:

There were ten 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 apple cider-heap
As of no worth.

The work of “picking" here suggests the deed of divine judgment. The act of
'cherishing' the overwhelming count the numberless mass before Him-at the moment
each is separated from the stem of life-is, of course, physically impossible. His
declared purpose to "not let fall" any apple becomes offset, disturbingly, by the lot of
those "that struck the earth" whether bruised, blemished or not, who become judged
"as of no worth." Frost distinguishes those who are chosen or 'cherished' and those,
earthbound, again experiencing the unfortunate fall, as did, indeed, the progeny of
Adam and Eve.

In the biblical account, at the point of their "fall," Adam and Eve were told by the
serpent, "Your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods knowing good and evil"
(1.3.5). Their eyes in fact open so that they may themselves bear painful witness to
their infirmity and their lot forever to toil. Frost's hard-working apple-picker, brought
down by his work, but ennobled by his industry (we recall his ladder is "sticking
through a tree [1]) because he is raised in the virtue of his labor, cannot, predictably,
see well; in fact, he compares his inadequate vision to what he had seen earlier that
day when he lifted a piece of ice from a trough to serve him as a kind of lens. That he
was well upon his way to sleep, at that time, in the morning, and verges upon sleeping
now, at workday's end, is an effect clearly established in the poem to confuse time, to
meld past with present and future. This suggestion of a timeless presence carries with
it an intimation of a higher order of being present. His work his only grace, the apple-
picker cannot 'see' that he cannot see. And what he cannot see is what God in his
vision Himself envisions. God through the apple-picker perceives conclusively those
saved and those fallen, the final knowledge of good and evil from the tree.

Thus, the vision Frost's worker inadequately "sees," however, is not his alone. Frost
has us witness what his dreamer cannot see and what God sees: a vision transcending
the dreaming narrator's dream. As he carries Jacob's dream with him after ending his
work, his long-sought, now-at hand rest evokes that of God. But he, moving
downward upon the ladder, like the apple "as of no worth," frail and fallen, can think
only to consult a woodchuck's wisdom. The vision of God, disturbing and haunting as
it may be, presents knowledge which he, and we, like Jacob, 'knew not' but which yet
 appears before him and us. Frost's dreamer's vision, inevitably, becomes disturbing to
men but disturbing more to God as God's vision of His inevitable Final Judgment.
Perhaps the reluctance on the part of the speaker to distinguish between what is, in
fact, cherished and what is "as of no worth" (37) is as unclear to God as it is to man.
The ambiguity of as conveys that indistinction addressed finally, years later, in Frost's
A Masque of Reason at the point when God gets specific about his gratitude to Job:

My thanks are to you for releasing me

From moral bondage to the human race.
The only free will there at first was man's
Who could do good or evil as he chose.
I had no choice but to follow him
With forfeits and rewards he understood—
Unless I liked to suffer loss of worship.
I had to prosper good and punish evil.
You changed all that. You set me free to reign.
You are the Emancipator of your God,
And as such I promote you to a saint.

 After Apple Picking- The poem's title, evoking a postlapsarian connotation, conveys
the disturbing final disposition of the divine will: free, ultimately, to be not free. Man,
hence, and God, in Frost's pastoral allegory, are both troubled for reasons beyond
each: God in having led Himself to follow man, man in having been led to not know
God's presence, thereby, in himself.

Apple Picking as Hypnagogic vision D

 Frost juxtaposition of waking and sleeping, fact and dream, attempts to define the
harvester’s semi waking state have varied. Robert Penn warren describes, “the literal
world dissolves into a kind of dream world - the literal world and the dream world
overlapping, as it were, like the two sets of elements in a superimposed photograph"
while
Priscila Paton says the harvester moving “back and forth between the facts of the
orchard" and the sensations and images of a dream", but then contends that we are
witnessing in fact a "waking dream" which "observes no distinct boundary between
sleep and wakefulness in the speaker's consciousness"
John J. Conder also points out that the boundaries between dream and fact are
unclear:

It is by no mean certain, of course, whether the 'dreaming' is confined to the visual

description of the apples or whether it includes all the aftereffects of picking apples.
Since this is probably more than a simple night's sleep, it is likely that the dream is
much like one experienced when awake, as when a person still feels the rocking of the
boat even after he has set foot on firm land
 And Richard Poirier explains the relationship of the two states in the poem by
appealing to Frost's poetic method:
Indeed, the conceptual frame of the poem, if so heavy a phrase is appropriate to it, is
held together by the way 'dream' gets stated in terms of waking experience, waking
experience in terms of dream. This is an occasion when the precondition of metaphor
itself seems to be that the normal distinction between dreaming and waking state be
suspended

Perhaps grounding their approaches to the poem in terms of Frost's well-known use of
paired opposites, critics tend to suggest that he is yoking together two contrasting
states to create a poetic unity, thus also creating a hypnagogic state, I.e., the regular
concomitant of falling asleep. Trains of faces, landscapes, etc., pass before the mental
eye, first as fancies; then as pseudo-hallucinations, finally as full-fledged
hallucinations forming dreams."

 Frost connection to the ‘second sight’- frost had grown up in Swedenborgian and
baptized in its Church, “a sect Emanuel Swedenborg founded "only after his own
powers of second sight had enabled him to converse with spirits and angels - through
dreams and visions and mysterious conversations" (Thompson 11)
 Frost’s third published poem, "A Dream of Julius Caesar," (May,1891) records a
dream-vision: "For at my feet a far up reaching ladder rests, /And as I gaze a form,
scarce seen at first, / Glides down a moment, and before me stands . . . Caesar"
 The speaker's point of view is shaped by this mental state. The poem does not begin in
wakefulness and then drift into dream; rather, the entire work is expressed
hypnagogically. The key phrase of the poem is not, as Brower says, "essence of winter
sleep" (8), but instead "I am drowsing off1 (8), which identifies the speaker's
transitional condition.
 Thematically, Frost's use of such an intermediate state of mind helps underscore the
speaker's dominant mood of anxiety. By framing his poem neither fully in the world
of fact nor in the world of dream, Frost suggests the speaker's tension between his
failed, grandiose effort to bring in "ten thousand" and his reluctance to confront the
"lovely punishment" (Squires 93) of the disturbing dream once he fully enters sleep.
The ambiguity of the poem’s ending lends it something of that terror which Lionel
Trilling said characterized Frost's deepest themes.
 Robert Penn Warren sees the dream to come as “good,” but if that were the case, we
should perhaps have been granted a poem of the dream itself, not a wary anticipation
of it.

Conclusion
 John Sears observes that “there is a sense of weariness in the poem that is almost
grief.” The speaker’s sense of trouble is evoked by a mental state which, though it
combines elements of both waking and dreaming, as has often been notes, is
psychologically distinct from each of these. His hypnagogic vision posits him
between a world of work which proved cloying in its intensity, exhausting in its
demands and a dream state which is curiously threatening, the "Magnified apples"
 rather like the sinister, disembodied "vague dream-head lifted out of ground" in the
poem "Tree at my Window."
 His hypnagogic vision is the last link with an attempt to achieve the ideal harvest.
With the recognition that his attempt has left him unsatisfied, we sense - though in a
minor tone - that familiar Frost denouement heard in "Once by the Pacific": "It looked
as if a night of dark intent / Was coming on."