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.
I heard Frost recite this poem in the documentary in his dry, unemphatic way, and saw Richard Wilbur and Seamus Heaney discussing it. Heaney called it "Frost's Ode to Autumn. In fact it's the one place where he surrenders to the wood." The woods appear and reappear in several of Frost's poems; the best-known are probably "Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening" and "Come in".
Certain that I'd encountered the poem before many years ago (when I read it much less attentively), reading it again was like reading it for the first time. It measures up to what Frost wrote in the introduction to his Collected Poems: "Like a piece of ice on a hot stove the poem must ride all its own melting. A poem may be worked over once it is in being, but may not be worried into being. Its most precious quality will remain its having run itself and carried away the poet with it. Read it a hundred times: it will forever keep its freshness as a metal keeps its fragrance. It can never lose its sense of a meaning that once unfolded by surprise as it went."(1)
Right away, I could see that the poem was not one of Frost's easier poems. There are two Robert Frosts, and the difference between them goes much deeper than poetic success or failure. It must have been deliberate, since he noticed that some of his poems got a great deal more attention from readers than others, and who better than Frost knew that they were not always his most important poems. In his 1963 essay on Frost, "A Momentary Stay," Irving Howe addresses this:
"It might be convenient, but is also a dangerous simplification, to draw a sharp line between his popular and superior poems. The two have a way of shading into one another ... in his small number of distinguished lyrics ... the archness and sentimentalism have been ruthlessly purged; he is writing for sheer life. To read these poems, as they confront basic human troubles and obliquely notice the special dislocations of our time, can be unnerving—for they offer neither security nor solace. They are the work of a poet who, without the mediation of formal thought or religious sentiments, gives close and hard battle to his own experience. They seek to capture those moments when we confront experience in its bareness, observing some natural event or place with a pure sense of the dynamics of reception. They set out to record such tremors of being in their purity and isolation: as if through a critical encounter with the physical world one could move beyond the weariness of selfhood and into the repose of matter. But Frost, now supremely hard on himself, also knows that the very intensity with which these amounts are felt makes certain their rapid dissolution, and that what then remains is the familiar self, once again its own prisoner. Approaching a pure state of being, these lyrics return with the necessity of shaped meaning. And in their somewhat rueful turning back to the discipline of consciousness, the effect is both painful and final: they conclude with the reflection that the central quandary of selfhood, that it must forever spiral back to its own starting point, cannot be dissolved."
"After Apple-picking" is a very odd Frost poem, one that is so ambiguous as to invite different conclusions about its meaning. Only recall what Amy Lowell wrote when the Frost collection North of Boston was published in America in 1915: "The charming idyll 'After Apple-picking,' is dusted over with something uncanny." That "something" is not easily identified. On its smooth surface, with a lilting cadence and rhyme, the poem describes how very late in the year, the speaker has finished picking nearly every available apple from his apple trees. He is so weary from his labors that he wonders if he might sleep the whole winter, like the woodchuck (who is already hibernating in his hole). But he was already tired, he says, when he began picking in the morning. Like the world around him, he is winding down toward something more than simply "human sleep." The grass is hoary with frost. The snow will come soon.
If "After Apple-picking" is Frost's Ode to Autumn, it doesn't fall easily in line with an idyll like John Clare's "To Autumn":
Come, pensive Autumn, with thy clouds and storms
And falling leaves and pastures lost to flowers;
A luscious charm hangs on thy faded forms,
More sweet than Summer in her loveliest hours,
Who in her blooming uniform of green
Delights with samely and continued joy:
But give me, Autumn, where thy hand hath been,
For there is wildness that can never cloy –
The russet hue of fields left bare, and all
The tints of leaves and blossoms ere they fall.
In thy dull days of clouds a pleasure comes,
Wild music softens in thy hollow winds;
And in thy fading woods a beauty blooms
That’s more than dear to melancholy minds.
A mind must be melancholy to prefer Autumn to Summer. At the close of "After Apple-picking," does the speaker, as Seamus Heaney claims, "surrender to the wood"? I have written before about two other poems by Frost, "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" and "Come in," in which the speaker is momentarily beguiled by a presence in a wood. "In many of Frost's poems," I wrote a year ago on this blog, "the voices of nature can be heard addressing him directly. But the things they tell him aren't at all what one might expect - like the thrush calling him to 'come in' to the woods at dusk or the beguiling beauty of a snowy woods that he stops to admire, until his horse pulls at his harness to remind him of his promises." The weariness of which the apple-picker speaks isn't simply physical. The sleep to which he is leaning, and the dreams he predicts will visit him, speak of a long year (a long life) coming to its close. It would be going too far, in this case, to say that what the speaker is going to is death. As Heaney says, it would rob the poem of all of its sensuous life.
(1) Robert Frost, "The Figure a Poem Makes."
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